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The Role of Bots in Enhancing Wikipedia's Cooperation and Stability
by Ethnology TechnologyDecember 19th, 2024
Too Long; Didn't Read
Wikipedia bots, though simple, complete vast edits and foster resilience through diverse, independent tasks. Their balanced interactions maintain the platform, with bot diversity ensuring robustness even during outages. Successful governance combines open development and distributed roles.
This is Part 6 of a 12-part series based on the research paper “Human-Machine Social Systems.” Use the table of links below to navigate to the next part.
Table of Links
Box 1: Competition in high-frequency trading markets
Box 3: Cooperation and coordination on Wikipedia
Box 4: Cooperation and contagion on Reddit
Conclusion, Acknowledgments, References, and Competing interests
Box 3: Cooperation and Coordination on Wikipedia
Wikipedia, the largest and most popular free-content online encyclopedia, hosts an ecology of bots that generate articles, fix errors on pages, link to other sites and databases, tag articles in categories, identify vandals, notify users, and so on[205,206,207]. These bots are open-source, documented, approved, registered, and tagged[208,205. They are not sophisticated: most use basic regular expressions or straightforward heuristics, and only some incorporate machine learning techniques. They are significantly less numerous than human editors but complete a disproportionately large volume of all edits [209,36,207]. Compared to human-human interactions, bot-bot interactions are more reciprocal and balanced but do not exhibit status effects [36].
While bots are more likely to be involved in back-and-forth reverts with each other over long periods, these accidental encounters rarely indicate direct opinion conflict but constitute routine productive maintenance work or reflect conflicts existing between their human owners [210]. Human editors interact mainly with policing bots, primarily by criticizing the legitimacy of the norms they enforce, rather than the sanctions themselves, suggesting that editors perceive bots as extensions of their human owners rather than independent agents[211].
Bots have been invaluable to the maintenance and operation of Wikipedia. The diversity of the bot ecology guarantees the system’s robustness and resilience. For instance, during the random outage of the anti-vandalism ClueBot NG, the website eventually caught up, albeit more slowly than usual, thanks to the heterogeneity of the quality control network, comprising instantaneous fully automated robots, rapid tool-assisted humans (cyborgs), humans editing via web browsers, and idiosyncratic batch scripts [212].
Wikipedia demonstrates that successful bot governance and regulation does not have to sacrifice distributed development and diversity. The algorithmic simplicity, independence, and heterogeneity of the machines facilitate the system’s success and resilience overall but may also introduce unexpected complexities and uncertainties in communication at smaller scales[213].
Authors:
(1) Milena Tsvetkova, Department of Methodology, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, United Kingdom;
(2) Taha Yasseri, School of Sociology, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland and Geary Institute for Public Policy, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland;
(3) Niccolo Pescetelli, Collective Intelligence Lab, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, New Jersey, USA;
(4) Tobias Werner, Center for Humans and Machines, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany.
This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY 4.0 DEED license.
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