Wikipedia would be a shambles without bots

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18892510

by paulsilver • 14 years ago

60 25 14 years ago

bbc.co.uk

bane4• 14 years ago

The bots do make mistakes, however, if they encounter a new circumstance their programming cannot account for. ClueBot NG, the anti-vandalism bot, has a small rate of false positives - edits it mistakes for vandalism, but which are in fact legitimate.

Since Wikipedia closely tracks edits, however, mistakes can be repaired almost as quickly as they happened, administrators say.

I think fairly consistent commentary over the years demonstrates that this is patently false. Deletionists are capricious and arbitrary, reversals are beauracratic, complex and lengthy (if even possible) It dissapoints me to think about how much legitimate human knowledge has been wiped from WP, the authors discouraged and WP made poorer for it.

derleth2• 14 years ago

> Deletionists are capricious and arbitrary

This is rather a broad brush, and a gross oversimplification of a complex debate that's been going on for a long time.

fghh45sdfhr3• 14 years ago

Any sufficiently complex debate is indistinguishable arbitrary action.

gwern• 14 years ago

> Deletionists are capricious and arbitrary, reversals are beauracratic, complex and lengthy (if even possible)

The article was clearly talking about repairing bot edits; since bots are almost* universally restricted to editor capabilities, all their actions are undoable. I have myself occasionally reverted bot edits - but very rarely, since generally bots are very good at what they do, and as the article says, they have made a huge difference in vandalism fighting.

(On the other hand, the article omits one of the major instances of bot abuse: the use of scripts/bots by a few editors to ram through removal of all the {{spoiler}} templates despite the absence of consensus to deprecate their use.)

* I remember a few proposals for admin-bots, but I don't remember whether they passed the Bot people or whether they were to do irreversible actions like deletion.

bane4• 14 years ago

To be clear, in this context, I'm only talking about delete bots who kill new content seconds after it's created. A phenomenon so frustrating and common that there are probably tens of thousands of examples on open forums of this (including HN) and no doubt is a huge part of the massive reduction in new editors and new user engagement at WP (as tracked in several Foundation reports over the years -- but somehow always ignore this issue).

user495984• 14 years ago

It dissapoints me to think about how much legitimate human knowledge has been wiped from WP

Then it must absolutely enthrall you to think about how much human knowledge is made available by wikipedia. You can be just as persistent as a "delitionist", theres nothing stopping you. It doesn't mean the system is broken just because some people are passionate about it.

user495984• 14 years ago

Did you downvote my comment because you don't agree with it or because you think it's non-constructive?

bane4• 14 years ago

It does enthrall me. But as time goes on, and the deletionist issue persists and becomes ingrained and is continuously ignored by WP and the Foundation, I can't help but think how much wasted potential is out there.

yichi• 14 years ago

> It dissapoints me to think about how much legitimate human knowledge has been wiped from WP

Wikipedia has never been about collecting sum of human knowledge, as it claims. It's about collecting sum of human knowledge that it can verify.

Wikipedia is designed from the beginning to be a tertiary source, and it's not an accident. This is why if you try to put any original content in it, it will usually get reverted, not because the content is wrong or even unhelpful, but the fact that nobody can verify it. (I'm not saying whether this is a good or a bad thing, it's just the way Wikipedia works) If you want to contribute original knowledge, don't use Wikipedia as a vehicle for doing so, you are better off writing to a blog/magazine/academic journal.

gaius• 14 years ago

one called rambot created about 30,000 articles - at a rate of thousands per day - on individual towns in the US

Umm, no, someone wrote a script and ran it. This article massively overestimates what a "bot" is.

Sharlin• 14 years ago

That's not really a meaningful distinction especially in an article meant for a popular audience. Besides:

A bot (derived from 'robot') is an automated or semi-automated tool that carries out repetitive and mundane tasks in order to maintain the 4,009,598 articles of the English Wikipedia.

-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots

Internet bots, also known as web robots, WWW robots or simply bots, are software applications that run automated tasks over the Internet. Typically, bots perform tasks that are both simple and structurally repetitive, at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone.

-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_bot

_delirium2• 14 years ago

I agree they're all bot-ish, but in the context of Wikipedia, I think it's useful to distinguish. Possibly not for the audience of the original article, but they do pretty different things.

Heuristic reactive bots are an interesting component of the human/machine hybrid "Wikipedia immune system" that keeps most encyclopedia articles non-vandalized most of the time, despite that seeming implausible at first (the most surprising thing about Wikipedia, if you've ever run any other wiki, is that it doesn't get totally full of spam and garbage within hours).

Others are more like content-import scripts, running once; Rambot falls into that category. And still others are closer to external implementations of functionality that MediaWiki is missing internally. For example, MediaWiki lacks a "rename category" function, so there are helper bots that will "rename" categories by mass-removing every article in the category and mass-adding it to the new category.

pavel_lishin• 14 years ago

I wish they'd cited some examples of the mistakes. In general, this article doesn't offer much that the submission title didn't cover.

TazeTSchnitzel• 14 years ago

Yeah, I expected it to be slightly more in-depth and to maybe mention several particular bots and profile them, perhaps.

espinchi• 14 years ago

Just some complementary information, extracted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots (very interesting for those that didn't know much about the role of bots in the wikipedia).

Over 60 million edit operations have been performed by bots on the English Wikipedia.

Some bot examples are: Yobot, that categorizes individuals in categories by birth date, profession and other criteria, SineBot, that signs comments left on talk pages, MiszaBot, that archives talk pages, Xqbot, that solves double redirects, ...

Some bots, like RussBot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:RussBot) have big red Emergency bot shutoff button.

Wikipedia would be a shambles without bots

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