“The very fact that we saw a lot of conflict among bots was a big surprise to us. When you think about them they are very boring,” said Yasseri. “We had very low expectations to see anything interesting. They are not intended to work against each other. The bots are simple computer programs that are written to make the encyclopedia better. 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. The findings emerged from a study that looked at bot-on-bot conflict in the first ten years of Wikipedia’s existence. “Humans usually cool down after a few days, but the bots might continue for years.” “The fights between bots can be far more persistent than the ones we see between people,” said Taha Yasseri, who worked on the study at the Oxford Internet Institute. Some conflicts only ended when one or other bot was taken out of action. 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. But over time, the number deployed on the encyclopedia exploded with unexpected consequences. In the early days, the bots were so rare they worked in isolation. 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. A new study from computer scientists has found that the online encyclopedia is a battleground where silent wars have raged for years.
Found on its pages are answers to mysteries from the fate of male anglerfish, the joys of dorodango, and the improbable death of Aeschylus.īut beneath the surface of Wikipedia lies a murky world of enduring conflict. For many it is no more than the first port of call when a niggling question raises its head.
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