Technology is supposed to make our lives easier. This is one case where a complication occurred.
Wikipedia has long worried about how to stop people from “vandalizing” their articles and willfully contributing information that’s wrong or comically unrelated. There simply aren’t enough human editors to handle the workload. Enter bots that use algorithms to automatically flag problems, fix typos, and even create articles.
But an unforeseen problem occurs: the bots don’t always interact well with each other, Wired is reporting. In those cases, one bot views something as an error, then a second bot interprets that change as the error.
The result: Bots fighting each other, engaged in an endless cycle of one making a “correction” and the other promptly correcting that alteration. (Or at least they would, if not for humans jumping in to make them go to their separate corners.)
Wikipedia needs to figure out how to solve the breakdown as bots are essential to the site. While Wikipedia currently has roughly 30,000 active human editors to only 300 bots, the bots work at a speed Homo sapiens simply can’t match.
To learn more about the Wikipedia bot battle, read Matt Simon’s story in Wired or visit the journal PLOS ONE’s study on Wikipedia’s bots.
—RealClearLife
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