Study Reveals Bot-On-Bot Editing Wars Raging On Wikipedia's Pages (theguardian.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A new study from computer scientists has found that the online encyclopedia is a battleground where silent wars have raged for years. Since Wikipedia launched in 2001, its millions of articles have been ranged over by software robots, or simply "bots," that are built to mend errors, add links to other pages, and perform other basic housekeeping tasks. In the early days, the bots were so rare they worked in isolation. But over time, the number deployed on the encyclopedia exploded with unexpected consequences. The more the bots came into contact with one another, the more they became locked in combat, undoing each other's edits and changing the links they had added to other pages. Some conflicts only ended when one or other bot was taken out of action. The findings emerged from a study that looked at bot-on-bot conflict in the first ten years of Wikipedia's existence. The researchers at Oxford and the Alan Turing Institute in London examined the editing histories of pages in 13 different language editions and recorded when bots undid other bots' changes. While some conflicts mirrored those found in society, such as the best names to use for contested territories, others were more intriguing. Describing their research in a paper entitled Even Good Bots Fight in the journal Plos One, the scientists reveal that among the most contested articles were pages on former president of Pakistan Pervez Musharraf, the Arabic language, Niels Bohr and Arnold Schwarzenegger. One of the most intense battles played out between Xqbot and Darknessbot which fought over 3,629 different articles between 2009 and 2010. Over the period, Xqbot undid more than 2,000 edits made by Darknessbot, with Darknessbot retaliating by undoing more than 1,700 of Xqbot's changes. The two clashed over pages on all sorts of topics, from Alexander of Greece and Banqiao district in Taiwan to Aston Villa football club.

Comments

Obsolete

[Tablizer]

As a troll, I'm upset my job is being automated away.

What's next, bums will be automated?

funniest bot-on-bot edits

[buss_error]

The funniest bot-on-bot edit occurs when someone on Amazon is reselling from Ebay, and the ebay seller is tagging their price to Amazon. Not unusual to see the prices go into the millions of dollars for something idiotic.

Re:funniest bot-on-bot edits

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

A younger inexperienced Indian chief was wondering how much firewood he needed to gather for the winter. He was not like the chiefs in the past that could tell from the clouds and stuff like that.

He decided to make his people gather tons of firewood, more than they usually gather just to be safe. The young chief was still curious though so he decided to call the weather service people.

They said that it was supposed to be a pretty cold winter, colder than most years. So the young chief made his people gather more firewood. They were getting pretty tired.

Again the chief called the weather service and they said that it was suppose to be even colder. So the Indians went back to wood cutting, and were getting even more tired. Some were even ill and there hands were rubbed raw and blistered. They had to build a whole other hut for all of the firewood which took even more wood to build.

Once again the chief called, and the weather service said that there may be another ice age. The chief asked him how they could tell all of this and he simply replied, "Because the Indians are gathering firewood like crazy!"

Re:funniest bot-on-bot edits

[wbr1]

It's is actually not often eBay resellers. I sell on Amazon as a 3rd party reseller. I use a repricer, a bot that adjusts my prices based off of competition and rules I set. If not set right, if there are only 2 or 3sellers, one cane jack the price up, trigger the repricer to follow. The auto priced listing will get deactivated by Amazon, and if the seller isn't checking to reactivate it and fix the pricing error, the other seller can then drop price, get the preferred listing and make sales. Some reprice bots can be configured to be agressive and trigger the behavior in others.

Re:funniest bot-on-bot edits

[AmiMoJo]

That might be deliberate. On eBay if you stop selling an item you lose the "x already sold" stat when you re-list. So when sellers run out of something, instead of ending the listing they set the price to a million bucks so no-one will buy it while they wait for more stock.

If you want to force the price of something down there are a few good techniques. Try camelcamelcamel first, put in some price 10-15% below the current one and wait. If it's not selling at a loss someone will usually meet it fairly quickly.

A better summary

[nyri]

Here's a better summary copy-pasted from the article as the one copy-pasted from The Guardian article is shit *.

In recent years, there has been a huge increase in the number of bots online, varying from Web crawlers for search engines, to chatbots for online customer service, spambots on social media, and content-editing bots in online collaboration communities. The online world has turned into an ecosystem of bots. However, our knowledge of how these automated agents are interacting with each other is rather poor. Bots are predictable automatons that do not have the capacity for emotions, meaning-making, creativity, and sociality and it is hence natural to expect interactions between bots to be relatively predictable and uneventful. In this article, we analyze the interactions between bots that edit articles on Wikipedia. We track the extent to which bots undid each other’s edits over the period 2001–2010, model how pairs of bots interact over time, and identify different types of interaction trajectories. We find that, although Wikipedia bots are intended to support the encyclopedia, they often undo each other’s edits and these sterile “fights” may sometimes continue for years. Unlike humans on Wikipedia, bots’ interactions tend to occur over longer periods of time and to be more reciprocated. Yet, just like humans, bots in different cultural environments may behave differently. Our research suggests that even relatively “dumb” bots may give rise to complex interactions, and this carries important implications for Artificial Intelligence research. Understanding what affects bot-bot interactions is crucial for managing social media well, providing adequate cyber-security, and designing well functioning autonomous vehicles.

* The Guardian, directly quoted in the summary is doing random edits and seems to be incapable of high-lighting the main points. Case in point. The article has the following quote:

[S]ome of the articles most contested by bots are about Pervez Musharraf (former president of Pakistan), Uzbekistan, Estonia, Belarus, Arabic language, Niels Bohr, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

While The Guardian sees it fit to shorten this to:

The scientists reveal that among the most contested articles were pages on former president of Pakistan Pervez Musharraf, the Arabic language, Niels Bohr and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Note how the order of the list stays the same and how Pervez Musharraf is explained with the same words ("former president of Pakistan"). It seems obvious that the journalist has copy-pasted the sentence and then proceeded to remove references to Uzbekistan, Estonia, and Belarus. This edit strikes me as odd. Why remove those bit while leaving the others. What's more, the article has selected the examples carefully to highlight their main point (you won't find anything resembling it from the The Guardian article):

This would suggest that a significant portion of bot-bot fighting occurs across languages rather than within. In contrast, the articles with most human-human reverts tend to concern local personalities and entities and tend to be unique for each language.

Re:A better summary

[Verdatum]

This is vastly better. Slashdot's summary is one of the most sensationalized non-issues I've seen on /. in a few months now. It didn't take very long at all for bot conflicts to become obvious to bot-authors, at which point and they quickly put in code to notice edit conflicts. When the bots spot back & forth editing, they back off, and alert the bot's maintainer. It took a little longer to notice loops that spanned across the different language editions of articles, but that's because the relationship among them is usually pretty weak. This Summary acts like a bot-conflict spanning 3629 articles is something impressive. In that time period, that represents around 0.01% of the article namespace when you span all language variants of WP, and the bots in question do seriously boring things related to cleaning up redirect-links or fixing named references if they become broken as an unintended side effect of a user's edit.

As far as this better summary, and looking at a longer summary from the Alan Turing Institute website, it looks like it's also inflating the implications of the study. It's certainly true that simple rules can result in complex unintended conflicts, but that's already a well-known idea. Specific novel lessons learned from this study have pretty weak implications to AI. And the cultural conclusions it draws are borderline silly. "the same technology leads to different outcomes depending on the cultural environment. An automated vehicle will drive differently on a German autobahn to how it will through the Tuscan hills of Italy." I'm gonna guess that this guy isn't a software developer. Upon checking, yup, he's a physicist turned social-scientist.