Bots

Mancunium · Unread post by **Mancunium** » Thu Feb 13, 2014 3:01 pm

The Shadowy World Of Wikipedia's Editing Bots
MIT Technology Review, 13 January 2014 link

Much of the editing work on Wikipedia is too mind-numbingly repetitive for humans, so automated bots do it instead. But keeping track of automated editing has always been hard…until now. In a little over a decade, Wikipedia has evolved from an internet experiment into a global crowdsourcing phenomenon. [...] Less well known is Wikidata, an information repository designed to share basic facts for use on different language versions of Wikipedia. [...] Behind the scenes, automated bots scan Wikipedia and Wikidata pages continually polishing the content for human consumption.

But that raises an important question. How much bot activity is there? What are these bots doing and how does it compare to human activity? Today, we get an answer thanks to the work of Thomas Steiner at Google’s German operation in Hamburg. Steiner has created an application that monitors editing activity across all 287 language versions of Wikipedia and on Wikidata. And he publishes the results in real time online so that anybody can see exactly how many bots and humans are editing any of these sites at any instant. [...] Steiner’s page also lists the most active bots. Wikipedia and Wikidata have long recognised the damage that bots can do and so have strict guidelines about their behaviour. Wikidata even lists bots with approved tasks

What’s curious about the automated edits on Wikidata is that the most active bots are not on this list. For example, at the time of writing a bot called Succubot is making 5797 edits to Wikidata entries and yet appears to be unknown to Wikidata. What is this bot doing? Steiner’s page will give administrators a useful window into this seemingly shadowy behaviour. [...] An interesting corollary is that bots are becoming much more capable at producing articles of all kinds. [...] All that’s required is to cut and paste the relevant information into the correct places. [...] And while this kind of automated writing can be hugely useful, particularly for Wikipedia and its well documented problems with manpower, it could also be used maliciously too. So ways of monitoring automated changes to text are likely to become more important in future.

Bots vs. Wikipedians, Anons vs. Logged-Ins
Cornell University Library, 5 February 2014 link

Abstract
Wikipedia is a global crowdsourced encyclopedia that at time of writing is available in 287 languages. Wikidata is a likewise global crowdsourced knowledge base that provides shared facts to be used by Wikipedias. In the context of this research, we have developed an application and an underlying Application Programming Interface (API) capable of monitoring realtime edit activity of all language versions of Wikipedia and Wikidata. This application allows us to easily analyze edits in order to answer questions such as "Bots vs. Wikipedians, who edits more?", "Which is the most anonymously edited Wikipedia?", or "Who are the bots and what do they edit?". To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time such an analysis could be done in realtime for Wikidata and for really all Wikipedias--large and small. Our application is available publicly online at this http URL, its code has been open-sourced under the Apache 2.0 license.

PDF of study: link

Wikipedia and Wikidata Realtime Edit Stats: link

Unread post by **Zoloft** » Thu Feb 13, 2014 5:01 pm

This is extremely useful coverage. Thank you!

Wikipedia Bots (T-H-L) are now notable enough to have their own article... but they don't of course...

I am thinking a blog post about bots and their infamous history on Wikipedia might be in order.

Mancunium · Unread post by **Mancunium** » Tue Feb 18, 2014 5:46 pm

This machine kills trolls
How Wikipedia’s robots and cyborgs snuff out vandalism
The Verge, 18 February 2014 link

[...] Within minutes if not seconds, bad edits are “reverted,” banished to a seldom-seen revision history. As Wikipedia has grown in size and complexity, so has the task of quality control; today that responsibility falls to a cadre of cleverly programmed robots and “cyborgs” — software-assisted volunteers who spend hours patrolling recent edits. Beneath its calm exterior, Wikipedia is a battlezone, and these are its front lines.

[... history of bots in Wikipedia ...]

[Cluebot] patrols 24 / 7, never sleeping or letting its attention flag. It can execute more than 9,000 edits per minute, though it never has to approach that limit. Since 2010 it’s run almost constantly, rolling back thousands of bad edits a day; in early 2013 it topped 2 million edits. One study showed that when Cluebot NG was not operating, the time to revert vandalism nearly doubled. Malicious edits were still found, by humans, but it took almost twice as long.

That’s what Cluebot does: like all bots, it makes work more efficient. But one Slashdotter questioned whether bots fit the fundamental ethos of Wikipedia as a community-edited project. After arguing that vandalism is a subjective judgment not reducible to mathematical formulae, beakerMeep wrote, "Editing bots are wrong for Wikipedia, and if they allow it they are letting go of their vision of community participation in favor of the visions (or delusions) of grand technological solutions." [...]

Mancunium · Unread post by **Mancunium** » Tue Feb 18, 2014 6:03 pm

The trollhunters: humans and cyborgs
Racing to revert vandalism is fun, but "you want to take a second to consider that you’re not crushing somebody."
The Verge, 18 February 2014 link

[...] SeaPhoto uses a program called Huggle, one of several add-ons that provides an easy interface for reviewing recent edits. That makes him, in the taxonomy of one article on Wikipedia vandalism, a "cyborg" — not a fully automated robot, but not a human manually reverting edits, either. [...] Without the crowd, Wikipedia stagnates. Participation in the site peaked in 2007; research suggests the rate of new editors slowed. There are several possible explanations for that, from the site’s clunky editing interface to its often impenetrable jargon to long-time editors shutting out new (but inexperienced) users. [...]

How does automation affect the social interactions among Wikipedians? That’s the question Aaron Halfaker, the Wikimedia Foundation researcher, has been asking. Looking at anti-vandalism software such as Huggle and Cluebot, he says, "I see this amazing thing: it makes Wikipedia tractable." The long-conventional view of the site as a free-for-all palimpsest of anonymous scribblings — "anyone can edit" — becomes something much different. The tools that saved Wikipedia also altered it by adding a layer of gatekeepers. [...]

EricBarbour · Unread post by **EricBarbour** » Sat Feb 22, 2014 10:33 pm

This thread was little noticed but it needs to be more prominent. Bot editing is both a good thing and a major problem for Wikipedia. No one controls most of the bots, or even knows how many there are. The "approved bot" list is currently at 1789, but doesn't mention many client-side bots that no one approved. Nor does it mention how many are unused/abandoned today, or what activity levels they see. The "registered bots" list was abandoned in 2011, very quietly. None of the vandalism-patrolling bots are mentioned on any of these pages.

The Bot Approval Group only has one active member right now, a videogame nerd called Hellknowz (T-C-L). So, the approval list always has a backlog.

When Wikipedia collapses, bot editing will be a major contributing factor. We can't even tell how much blame to place on the bots, because Wikipedians refuse to keep track of all of them, nor of what they do.

Mancunium · Unread post by **Mancunium** » Mon Feb 24, 2014 4:33 pm

EricBarbour wrote:This thread was little noticed but it needs to be more prominent. Bot editing is both a good thing and a major problem for Wikipedia. No one controls most of the bots, or even knows how many there are. The "approved bot" list is currently at 1789, but doesn't mention many client-side bots that no one approved. Nor does it mention how many are unused/abandoned today, or what activity levels they see. The "registered bots" list was abandoned in 2011, very quietly. None of the vandalism-patrolling bots are mentioned on any of these pages.

The Bot Approval Group only has one active member right now, a videogame nerd called Hellknowz (T-C-L). So, the approval list always has a backlog.

When Wikipedia collapses, bot editing will be a major contributing factor. We can't even tell how much blame to place on the bots, because Wikipedians refuse to keep track of all of them, nor of what they do.

I was surprised by the lack of interest here.

New app tracks Wikipedia edits by Internet bots and humans
NDTV, 24 February 2014 link

Researchers have created an application that monitors how much of Wikipedia entries are being created or edited by bots - software applications that run automated tasks over the Internet - and humans. [...] To keep entries coming and to keep them updated, bots have been created to grab information from one place and post them into another. [...] Thomas Steiner, a Customer Solutions Engineer at Google Germany, Hamburg and colleagues have created an application that can be accessed and used by anyone to see in real time what percentage of pages are being written by humans, versus bots. The application reveals that bots are doing a lot more of the work adding information to pages in non-English speaking countries, which suggests that the majority of Wikipedia content is still being created by human beings in the US and the UK, 'phys.org' reported. [...] "We have developed an application and an underlying Application Programming Interface (API) capable of monitoring realtime edit activity of all language versions of Wikipedia and Wikidata," researchers said. "This application allows us to easily analyse edits in order to answer questions such as "Bots vs Wikipedians, who edits more?", "Which is the most anonymously edited Wikipedia?", or "Who are the bots and what do they edit?" they said.

Also reported here:

New app tracks Wikipedia edits by bots and humans
Business Standard, 24 February 2014 link

New app tracks Wikipedia edits by bots and humans
The application revealed that bots are doing most of the work in non-English speaking countries.
The Indian Express, 24 February 2014 link

Mancunium · Unread post by **Mancunium** » Mon Feb 24, 2014 7:49 pm

Bots Vs. Wikipedians App To Track Edits By Bots On Wiki Pages
CrazyEngineers, 24 February 2014 link

[...] It is very difficult to determine which portion from Wikipedia is put by bots and which by human beings. To determine this, Thomas Steiner, a Customer Solution Engineer at Google Germany and his colleagues developed an application called 'Bots vs. Wikipedians' that can provide the statistics about the portions written by humans versus the ones written by internet bots on wiki pages. This application also helps in monitoring activities on wikidata which is a database to share data among different versions of Wikipedia.

The Bots vs. Wikipedians app now has a public API that sends out Wikipedia and Wikidata edits as Server-Sent Events. Those interested in the code behind this technology can check it on GitHub. Most of us would be thinking that, obviously the bots would perform better than human beings in terms of amount of data being put on website. But according to the statistics provided by this application, internet bots are only better in those countries which do not speak English. This tells us that maximum content on wiki pages are still being put by humans. [...]

This project emits a Server-Sent Event (SSE) upon each Wikipedia edit
GitHub link

EricBarbour · Unread post by **EricBarbour** » Tue Feb 25, 2014 3:29 am

Mancunium wrote:I was surprised by the lack of interest here.

Don't be. It's part and parcel of the "Wikipedia experience". Just like WR before it, many people don't come here to rationally discuss or study Wikipedia's massive internal problems, they come here primarily to whine "waaaah I was blocked".

Still happening today. Those folks have no interest in bots, because they weren't blocked or harassed by bots. It's always some kind of "personal issue", and bots are impersonal, therefore "not important".

Johnny Au · Unread post by **Johnny Au** » Tue Feb 25, 2014 4:03 am

ClueBot NG and SineBot have among the most edits of all Wikipedia accounts, human or bot.

enwikibadscience · Unread post by **enwikibadscience** » Tue Feb 25, 2014 4:19 am

EricBarbour wrote:
Mancunium wrote:I was surprised by the lack of interest here.
Don't be. It's part and parcel of the "Wikipedia experience". Just like WR before it, many people don't come here to rationally discuss or study Wikipedia's massive internal problems, they come here primarily to whine "waaaah I was blocked".

I do whine when I am here, but not usually about having been blocked.

Are any bots creating articles?

TungstenCarbide · Unread post by **TungstenCarbide** » Tue Feb 25, 2014 4:31 am

enwikibadscience wrote:Are any bots creating articles?

rambot was one of the earliest. It created tens of thousands of articles on towns from government data.

Johnny Au · Unread post by **Johnny Au** » Tue Feb 25, 2014 4:45 am

Most bots that create articles tend to be for other languages. The main topics tend to include asteroids, species, and settlements.

Kelly Martin · Unread post by **Kelly Martin** » Tue Feb 25, 2014 5:42 am

There is nothing inherently wrong with the idea of bots editing a wiki; bots are a good way to get around many of the inherent shortcomings of the MediaWiki platform. The problem is that there are far too many bots, many of them doing essentially the same thing but in different and sometimes incompatible ways, and many doing unknown things. There is no meaningful governance of bots, just as there is no meaningful governance of anything on Wikipedia.

As Eric notes, though, people tend not to care much because bots don't block people.

The Joy · Unread post by **The Joy** » Tue Feb 25, 2014 7:32 am

Kelly Martin wrote: As Eric notes, though, people tend not to care much because bots don't block people.

Well, there's TorNodeBot (T-C-L) that blocks Tor IPs. ProcseeBot (T-C-L) blocks open proxies. Of course, people who want to edit with those dastardly methods must have evil in mind.

enwikibadscience · Unread post by **enwikibadscience** » Tue Feb 25, 2014 2:11 pm

TungstenCarbide wrote:
enwikibadscience wrote:Are any bots creating articles?
rambot was one of the earliest. It created tens of thousands of articles on towns from government data.

I was thinking of the AlgaeBot and wondering if there are currently active bots creating articles.

thekohser · Unread post by **thekohser** » Tue Feb 25, 2014 3:13 pm

Johnny Au wrote:ClueBot NG and SineBot have among the most edits of all Wikipedia accounts, human or bot.

It seems that ClueBot III has given up archiving Jimbo's talk page. I wonder why that is?

Mancunium · Unread post by **Mancunium** » Tue Feb 25, 2014 3:35 pm

Researchers develop an app to track Wikipedia edits
Digit, 25 February 2014 link

Thomas Steiner, a Customer Solutions Engineer at Google Germany, Hamburg, and team have created an app that can be accessed by anyone to see what percentage of pages are being written by humans versus bots on Wikipedia in real time. [...] "We have developed an application and an underlying Application Programming Interface (API) capable of monitoring real-time edit activity of all language versions of Wikipedia and Wikidata," researchers said. "This application allows us to easily analyse edits in order to answer questions such as "Bots vs Wikipedians, who edits more?", "Which is the most anonymously edited Wikipedia?", or "Who are the bots and what do they edit?" they said.

Wikipedia has seen a decline of nearly 10 percent of its pageviews between December 2012 and December 2013. According to experts the decline has been caused due to Google's Knowledge Graph. The site recently announced Wikipedia Voice Intro Project (WikiVIP), in which the crowd sourced encyclopedia will add voice recordings on the biography pages of celebrities and other famous people.

EricBarbour · Unread post by **EricBarbour** » Wed Feb 26, 2014 1:33 am

thekohser wrote:
Johnny Au wrote:ClueBot NG and SineBot have among the most edits of all Wikipedia accounts, human or bot.
It seems that ClueBot III has given up archiving Jimbo's talk page. I wonder why that is?

They apparently don't know. You ought to ask Cobi (T-C-L), one of the least-discussed and least-noticed administrators on WP, despite his authorship of the popular ClueBots plus his ownership of an IRC system that few people know about.

(Yes, Cobi repeatedly tried to create an article about his "company", ClueNet. And it was deleted repeatedly.)

The Joy · Unread post by **The Joy** » Wed Feb 26, 2014 4:54 am

EricBarbour wrote:
thekohser wrote:
Johnny Au wrote:ClueBot NG and SineBot have among the most edits of all Wikipedia accounts, human or bot.
It seems that ClueBot III has given up archiving Jimbo's talk page. I wonder why that is?
They apparently don't know. You ought to ask Cobi (T-C-L), one of the least-discussed and least-noticed administrators on WP, despite his authorship of the popular ClueBots plus his ownership of an IRC system that few people know about.

(Yes, Cobi repeatedly tried to create an article about his "company", ClueNet. And it was deleted repeatedly.)

One of the most popular bots on Wikipedia has its name partly based on its creator's company? Where's the COI Patrol when you need them!?

Unread post by **Zoloft** » Wed Feb 26, 2014 5:57 am

The Joy wrote:
EricBarbour wrote:
thekohser wrote:
Johnny Au wrote:ClueBot NG and SineBot have among the most edits of all Wikipedia accounts, human or bot.
It seems that ClueBot III has given up archiving Jimbo's talk page. I wonder why that is?
They apparently don't know. You ought to ask Cobi (T-C-L), one of the least-discussed and least-noticed administrators on WP, despite his authorship of the popular ClueBots plus his ownership of an IRC system that few people know about.

(Yes, Cobi repeatedly tried to create an article about his "company", ClueNet. And it was deleted repeatedly.)
One of the most popular bots on Wikipedia has its name partly based on its creator's company? Where's the COI Patrol when you need them!?

Looking for a clue?

The Joy · Unread post by **The Joy** » Wed Feb 26, 2014 7:07 am

Zoloft wrote:
The Joy wrote:
EricBarbour wrote:
thekohser wrote:
Johnny Au wrote:ClueBot NG and SineBot have among the most edits of all Wikipedia accounts, human or bot.
It seems that ClueBot III has given up archiving Jimbo's talk page. I wonder why that is?
They apparently don't know. You ought to ask Cobi (T-C-L), one of the least-discussed and least-noticed administrators on WP, despite his authorship of the popular ClueBots plus his ownership of an IRC system that few people know about.

(Yes, Cobi repeatedly tried to create an article about his "company", ClueNet. And it was deleted repeatedly.)
One of the most popular bots on Wikipedia has its name partly based on its creator's company? Where's the COI Patrol when you need them!?
Looking for a clue?

I'm always for a good yarn.

Hex · Unread post by **Hex** » Wed Feb 26, 2014 12:45 pm

EricBarbour wrote: (Yes, Cobi repeatedly tried to create an article about his "company", ClueNet. And it was deleted repeatedly.)

Not quite. Cobi created the original article in 2007, it was deleted in 2008, and then recreated by DamianZaremba (T-C-L), another ClueNet person, in 2010. It survived until an AfD in 2013. Very recently some sockpuppeteer has been trying to recreate it.

SB_Johnny · Unread post by **SB_Johnny** » Wed Feb 26, 2014 2:39 pm

Mancunium wrote:Researchers develop an app to track Wikipedia edits
Digit, 25 February 2014 link
According to experts the decline has been caused due to Google's Knowledge Graph. The site recently announced Wikipedia Voice Intro Project (WikiVIP), in which the crowd sourced encyclopedia will add voice recordings on the biography pages of celebrities and other famous people.

Mancunium · Unread post by **Mancunium** » Wed Feb 26, 2014 2:48 pm

Wikipedia Is Edited by Bots. That’s a Good Thing.
Newsweek, 25 February 2014 link

Half of all edits to Wikipedia are made by bots. That stat, from a new study monitoring the site’s revisions, might seem like cause for alarm. But according to Wikipedia researchers, it’s key to the crowdsourced encyclopedia’s success. For a paper in the physics journal arXiv, Thomas Steiner, a Google engineer and Université Claude Bernard Lyon post-doctoral student, developed an app that monitors the edits on Wikipedia’s 287 language sites in real time. Newsweek ran the app for four days and found that, at the time of this post, 46 percents of edits were made by bots. [...] Today, according to [Wikimedia Foundation researcher Aaron] Halfaker, the most prolific anti-vandal bot is called ClueBot. It can detect and fix everything from profanity to mashed keys within seconds, he says. It is responsible for almost half of all edits on the English Wikipedia site. “From a computational perspective, its brilliant,” says [Berkeley computer science graduate student R. Stuart] Geiger. ClueBot also serves to ensure that a relatively small group of vandals can’t degrade the site’s legitimacy enough that volunteers stop putting in the time and effort to maintain it. “When that bot goes down,” Geiger says, “it eerily limits Wikipedians ability to make an encyclopedia.” [...]

EricBarbour · Unread post by **EricBarbour** » Wed Feb 26, 2014 10:48 pm

Hex wrote:
EricBarbour wrote: (Yes, Cobi repeatedly tried to create an article about his "company", ClueNet. And it was deleted repeatedly.)
Not quite. Cobi created the original article in 2007, it was deleted in 2008, and then recreated by DamianZaremba (T-C-L), another ClueNet person, in 2010. It survived until an AfD in 2013. Very recently some sockpuppeteer has been trying to recreate it.

Any opinions on who "Cobi" really is? Black-hat hacker, sockpuppet of someone else, or just simply a coder nerd? At least Zaremba is honest about his identity. I don't really want to do research on ClueNet, because from experience, these "shadowy hacking-esque outfits" are hopelessly nerdy, very secretive, and usually dull as dishwater.

Unread post by **HRIP7** » Thu Feb 27, 2014 7:30 am

ClueBot is actually a key factor keeping Wikipedia running. Without it, the site would have gone under long ago.

Johnny Au · Unread post by **Johnny Au** » Thu Feb 27, 2014 3:51 pm

HRIP7 wrote:ClueBot is actually a key factor keeping Wikipedia running. Without it, the site would have gone under long ago.

I must agree. Without ClueBot, Wikipedia would have been infested with vandalism that may go unnoticed. Vandalism hunting is not the most fun job. ClueBot is why Wikipedia exists to this day.

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Thu Feb 27, 2014 7:20 pm

Johnny Au wrote:
HRIP7 wrote:ClueBot is actually a key factor keeping Wikipedia running. Without it, the site would have gone under long ago.
I must agree. Without ClueBot, Wikipedia would have been infested with vandalism that may go unnoticed. Vandalism hunting is not the most fun job. ClueBot is why Wikipedia exists to this day.

But vandalism hunting is a big attraction for many users, especially those with editcountitis. if bots rendered that pointless, wouldn't it reduce the number of editors?

EricBarbour · Unread post by **EricBarbour** » Fri Feb 28, 2014 1:03 am

Poetlister wrote:
Johnny Au wrote:
HRIP7 wrote:ClueBot is actually a key factor keeping Wikipedia running. Without it, the site would have gone under long ago.
I must agree. Without ClueBot, Wikipedia would have been infested with vandalism that may go unnoticed. Vandalism hunting is not the most fun job. ClueBot is why Wikipedia exists to this day.
But vandalism hunting is a big attraction for many users, especially those with editcountitis. if bots rendered that pointless, wouldn't it reduce the number of editors?

And there is still much subtle vandalism, that ClueBot is useless against. Automation has its uses, but it's not a magical cure-all.
Not to mention patrollers, who might as well be robots, given their limited effectiveness.

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Thu Sep 29, 2016 7:27 pm

Is. Isn’t. Is. Isn’t. Is. Isn’t. It’s annoying enough when kids get stuck in this kind of loop. But certain bots on Wikipedia have been at it for years, endlessly making and unmaking each other’s edits in spats that never end.

New Scientist

Rogol Domedonfors · Unread post by **Rogol Domedonfors** » Tue May 30, 2017 2:25 pm

A blog post of the Research Newsletter reviews the publication this story is based on. The review is rather hostile – the editorial policy of the Research Newletter is rather obvious on such matters. Apparently the authors failed to check with the umpteen bot approval committees before publishing their work. Of course, this criticism completely fails to understand that the authors of the paper are not commenting on how Wikipedia projects are run, they are using Wkipedia bots as a test case for the study of unexpected complex phenomena in systems of autonomous agents. The fact that their evidence and analysis happens to show that Wikipedia projects are not well run, at least on this measure, is not the authors' problem, not is it a failing of their paper. it has, however, drawn media attention to Wikipedia in a way the reviewer doesn't like.

The review is distinctly personal in tone. Although the paper has four authors, one of them, Taha Yasseri, is repeatedly name-checked, and there's an elegant personal side-swipe at the end, referring to "a previous paper coauthored by Dr. Yasseri that likewise focused heavily on conflicts and received a large amount of media attention". Not too hard to see that as an implicit accusation of being publicity-seeking and anti-Wikipedian. So in the same vein, I conclude by observing that the author of the review, Aaron Halfaker, writes under a volunteer handle without revealing that he is paid by the WMF.

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Sat Sep 02, 2017 9:36 pm

Warning: This is from the Daily Mail.

My colleagues and I recently studied one type of a complex system that featured good bots used to automatically edit Wikipedia articles.

These different bots are designed and exploited by Wikipedia's trusted human editors and their underlying software is open-source and available for anyone to study. Individually, they all have a common goal of improving the encyclopaedia.

Yet their collective behaviour turns out to be surprisingly inefficient.

Who here is surprised?

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Sat Feb 17, 2018 9:04 pm

For those who make a living or find pleasure writing Wikipedia articles, be aware that you may want to get as many Wikis possible completed while you still can. The bots might be coming for your gig sooner than later.

A paper recently published through the Cornell University Library documents how Google is teaching bots to aggregate information found on various websites in order to create a Wikipedia page that aggregates its finding into a single text. In other words, to do just as humans have been doing since April of 2008 (sic), when Wikipedia was first created.

Disruptor Daily

Would such a Google bot use this article as a reliable source for the date Wikipedia started?

JCM · Unread post by **JCM** » Sat Feb 17, 2018 9:14 pm

Poetlister wrote:Would such a Google bot use this article as a reliable source for the date Wikipedia started?

Or know how easy it might be for some largish groups to maybe accentuate web sites giving their version of a particular matter and by so doing throw off the balance in their content?

Graaf Statler · Unread post by **Graaf Statler** » Sat Feb 17, 2018 9:59 pm

That must be extreem clever bots to avoid European copyright with it's Code Napoleon! To be more precise, it must be telepathic bots, because they must anticipate, and understand what's going on in the brain of a European judge! Because, the copyright protection is inseparable from a tekst fragment! And not to forget to mention the European
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and the new copyright what a collection of quotes creates in our legal system!!

BrillLyle · Unread post by **BrillLyle** » Sat Feb 17, 2018 10:53 pm

Poetlister wrote:
For those who make a living or find pleasure writing Wikipedia articles, be aware that you may want to get as many Wikis possible completed while you still can. The bots might be coming for your gig sooner than later.

A paper recently published through the Cornell University Library documents how Google is teaching bots to aggregate information found on various websites in order to create a Wikipedia page that aggregates its finding into a single text. In other words, to do just as humans have been doing since April of 2008 (sic), when Wikipedia was first created.
Disruptor Daily

Would such a Google bot use this article as a reliable source for the date Wikipedia started?

No worry there. Google fails at everything but search and mail.

Ming · Unread post by **Ming** » Sat Feb 17, 2018 11:15 pm

If they aggregate as well as Google Translate, well, transliterates, Ming fears not the competition.

Graaf Statler · Unread post by **Graaf Statler** » Sat Feb 17, 2018 11:24 pm

Ming is complete right. On WP-NL were many experiments with botmatic written articles, and the result was, or better said is dramatic. Most of them are copyright violations, and/or of a extreem poor quality, and filled up with wrong information. The botmatic articles has completely destroyed Wikipedia-NL, because good writers were trolled out in the advantage of bot owners.
They didn't need them, and they didn't wanted them, with the support of Wikimedia-NL members. At the end the result was or better is one big Trollopedia, supported by WMF. The final result of this experiment: One big digital trash can filled up with copyvio, what can pull WMF legal under water and a digital hell on earth.

CrowsNest · Unread post by **CrowsNest** » Sun Feb 18, 2018 1:15 am

A far more useful use of such technology of course, is to cut Wikipedia out of the loop. Knowledge from reliable sources on demand, never left around to be vandalised.....

Kumioko · Unread post by **Kumioko** » Sun Feb 18, 2018 1:21 am

There have been several article writing bots in the past and historically the Wikipedia community hasn't been very accepting of them. Unless this bot can write at least a start class article, with references, I wouldn't count on it happening any time soon.

Graaf Statler · Unread post by **Graaf Statler** » Sun Feb 18, 2018 1:35 am

Kumioko wrote:There have been several article writing bots in the past and historically the Wikipedia community hasn't been very accepting of them. Unless this bot can write at least a start class article, with references, I wouldn't count on it happening any time soon.

It is very, very hard to write a article in this way, even a start, if you use material with a European origin. Almost everything in Europe is somewhere protected, the reason I gave you. If you use materiel out of a European database: A violation. A small part of a existing text: A violation. Out of a collection of quotes: A violation.
If you do so, you can only use American material or material out of the Public Domain. And copyvio=copyvio in Europe, even if there only a small part of what i mentioned in a article, because Europe has no Fair Use! And be aware, the use of protected material, can be a crime! And that is up to the european judge. It is technical impossible to disconnect or to separate the copyright or protection from a something (text, data, a quote), when it's European material. That was were the whole discussion was about om WQ-NL, and why I am trolled out. Because this is not what you call good news for the wiki mouvement...

Randy from Boise · Unread post by **Randy from Boise** » Sun Feb 18, 2018 6:13 pm

In the end the Keystone Cops Concept of 2,257 different Wikipedias in indigenous languages proves fortuitous when machine translation and machine writing are perfected...

RfB

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Sun Feb 18, 2018 8:45 pm

As people have said, there are already bots that can write articles, and indeed on some wikis most of the articles were so written. That's why the Cebuano wiki has very nearly as many articles as the English one despite having little more than 1% as many editors.

It may well be that this project will produce better bots, but that's not saying a great deal!

Graaf Statler · Unread post by **Graaf Statler** » Sun Feb 18, 2018 9:23 pm

Randy from Boise wrote:In the end the Keystone Cops Concept of 2,257 different Wikipedias in indigenous languages proves fortuitous when machine translation and machine writing are perfected...

RfB

First you have to solve the copyright matter, Randy, America is not ruling the world. Think of selling stolen cars, copyright violations can even be a crime in Europe. I am sure the regulation on they internet will only get strikter in the future in Europe. There is no political will to change anything. America has no influence on copyright laws in the rest of the world, nor on the legal systems. Just repeating a pink dream is pointless. Complete pointless.

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Sun Aug 19, 2018 11:28 am

The Wikipedia community, the free encyclopedia that is built from a model of openly editable content, is notorious for its toxicity. The issue was so bad that the number of active contributors or editors—those that made one edit per month—had fallen by 40 percent during an eight-year period. Even though there’s not one solution to combat this issue, Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that supports Wikipedia, decided to use artificial intelligence to learn more about the problem and consider ways to combat it.

Forbes

Randy from Boise · Unread post by **Randy from Boise** » Sun Aug 19, 2018 12:57 pm

Poetlister wrote:
The Wikipedia community, the free encyclopedia that is built from a model of openly editable content, is notorious for its toxicity. The issue was so bad that the number of active contributors or editors—those that made one edit per month—had fallen by 40 percent during an eight-year period. Even though there’s not one solution to combat this issue, Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that supports Wikipedia, decided to use artificial intelligence to learn more about the problem and consider ways to combat it.
Forbes

Use of AI to flag potentially toxic comments seems logical.

Use of AI to write articles in Wikipedia style from random websites smacks of being a crackpot scheme. Machine translation from other language Wikipedias? Now that might work.

RfB

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Sun Aug 19, 2018 1:45 pm

Randy from Boise wrote:Use of AI to write articles in Wikipedia style from random websites smacks of being a crackpot scheme. Machine translation from other language Wikipedias? Now that might work.

RfB

Vast numbers of articles on wikis in foreign languages have been translated from the English. The results are rather mixed.

Dysklyver · Unread post by **Dysklyver** » Sun Aug 19, 2018 3:25 pm

Poetlister wrote:
Randy from Boise wrote:Use of AI to write articles in Wikipedia style from random websites smacks of being a crackpot scheme. Machine translation from other language Wikipedias? Now that might work.

RfB
Vast numbers of articles on wikis in foreign languages have been translated from the English. The results are rather mixed.

But mostly bad.

This crackpot scheme seems to work because the resulting articles sort of make sense. It's not going to take off though, because of the limitations involved.

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Sat Apr 13, 2019 5:22 pm

With crowdsourced content, citations are crucial to providing accuracy and reliability in the site’s vast ocean of articles, but according to a blog post from the Wikimedia Foundation, around 25% of Wikipedia’s English-language articles lack a single citation. ... Jonathan Morgan, senior design researcher and coauthor of Wikimedia’s “Citation Needed” study, noted accuracy isn’t the only advantage. “Citations not only allow Wikipedia readers and editors to fact-check information, they also provide jumping-off points for people who want to learn more about a topic,” he said.

Venturebeat

Unread post by **Midsize Jake** » Sun Apr 14, 2019 7:45 pm

I hate to admit this, but assuming the WMF really is the primary funding source for this project, I'd have to say they've actually managed to come up with a worthwhile use of their money this time. That's not to say it's going to work, and of course a lot of the hardcore WP users probably won't like it, but this is the sort of thing they should invest heavily in if they're serious about extending their maintenance phase for as many years as possible.

Here's the full study (PDF).