The great Wikipedia bot-pocalypse: Challenging an establishe

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Kumioko
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The great Wikipedia bot-pocalypse: Challenging an establishe

Post by Kumioko » Thu Aug 31, 2017 12:20 am

The WMF released a new blog story outlining problems and perceptions of problems, with the way bots operate on the WMF projects, especially the flagship, Wikipedia.

In the blog they identify several stories that had been run by various newspapers and websites outlining some of the problems. I don't normally repost WMF blog stories but this one is a more critical piece and has a good number of links to additional sources so I felt it was a good exception to that rule.

Of course the WMF contests some of the arguments made about bots battling each other and both sides have good points, but I think it's fair to say that perception means a lot, so if major newspapers in the outside world highlight problems with bots on Wikipedia, right or wrong or fake news, it helps Hasten the day...because lets face it folks, a lot more people are reading the Guardian and the Huffington post than some blog written by WMF staffers for Wikipedia insiders.

Here is a link: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/08/30/w ... pocalypse/
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Re: The great Wikipedia bot-pocalypse: Challenging an establ

Post by The End » Thu Aug 31, 2017 4:46 am

Remember Cyde Weys from the old days? I still remember his blog post years ago about the bots, particularly his bot: Cydebot.

http://www.cydeweys.com/blog/2008/05/26 ... ombie-bot/

This comment of Cyde's is what struck me then and now:

Cyde Weys wrote:And to any Wikipedia administrator who reads this and whose first thought is immediately to block Cydebot for “running unattended”, get a grip! Cydebot is functioning just fine and blocking it would impose a huge burden on the CFD folk (as I have not publicly released the source code for that particular functionality). The tasks Cydebot is running are not very error-prone, and since I do still read Wikipedia all the time, if there is a problem, simply leave a message on my talk page and I’ll respond to it quickly. I still very much care about the success of Wikipedia, so if it’s a simple problem I’ll fix the bot and if it’s a hard-to-fix problem I’ll just shut that particular bot down. But there’s no excuse for using the admissions in this post as an excuse to block Cydebot. It’s already run fine in this state for a whole year making hundreds of thousands of necessary but thankless edits, so why stop a good thing?
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Re: The great Wikipedia bot-pocalypse: Challenging an establ

Post by Graaf Statler » Thu Aug 31, 2017 11:35 am

In my opinion it's beter rename all bots in Rambobot 1, Rambobot 2, Ramabobot 3, etc. No beter wiki weapon than a bot!
Romaine is a real expert in Rambobots with his Romainebot. Nobody can defended himself if it's comes by. And there are more of this rambobot pilots, always covered by other rambobot idiots.

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Re: The great Wikipedia bot-pocalypse: Challenging an establ

Post by Flip Flopped » Thu Aug 31, 2017 3:46 pm

Halfaker's blog post was weakest in the interview section, partially because it seemed to come out of nowhere. Overall it needed more examples of perceived bot-wars.

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Re: The great Wikipedia bot-pocalypse: Challenging an establ

Post by Kumioko » Thu Aug 31, 2017 4:41 pm

One very important thing that is missing from this article is how editors in the community perceive and interact with these bots. Some folks love them and other folks hate them and look for any and every reason to shut them down. Now some edits and some bots are more prone to errors than others for a variety of reasons so if you have a bot that does a lot of edits but has a very low error rate of less than 1% people start causing a ruckus about all the problems.

Unfortunately the WMF and the Arbarati don't get involved and don't tell this vocal minority to sit own and shut up.
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Re: The great Wikipedia bot-pocalypse: Challenging an establ

Post by Flip Flopped » Fri Sep 01, 2017 1:56 am

Kumioko wrote:One very important thing that is missing from this article is how editors in the community perceive and interact with these bots. Some folks love them and other folks hate them and look for any and every reason to shut them down. Now some edits and some bots are more prone to errors than others for a variety of reasons so if you have a bot that does a lot of edits but has a very low error rate of less than 1% people start causing a ruckus about all the problems.

Unfortunately the WMF and the Arbarati don't get involved and don't tell this vocal minority to sit own and shut up.
Some Wikipedians freak out even when a bot's error rate is less than 1%? How low does it have to get before they don't freak out?

Thinking back on that blog post, it's clearly a PR effort. Not interesting other than for that.

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Re: The great Wikipedia bot-pocalypse: Challenging an establ

Post by Kumioko » Fri Sep 01, 2017 2:43 am

Some expect a Zero % error rate believe it or not.
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Re: The great Wikipedia bot-pocalypse: Challenging an establ

Post by Flip Flopped » Sat Sep 02, 2017 2:04 am

Kumioko wrote:Some expect a Zero % error rate believe it or not.
What happens if a bot operator drifts away from Wikipedia and the bot makes some errors? Block the bot? Is there any less drastic solution?

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Re: The great Wikipedia bot-pocalypse: Challenging an establ

Post by Kumioko » Sat Sep 02, 2017 3:31 am

Not unless they use labs for the bot operation and have added other people to the list of authorized users.
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