{"id":948,"title":"\u201cMy Colleague the Robot\u201d \u2013 How People and Automated Assistants Work Together at Wikipedia.","link":"https:\/\/www.reframetech.de\/en\/2017\/12\/06\/my-colleague-the-robot-how-people-and-automated-assistants-work-together-at-wikipedia\/","date":"12\/06\/2017","date_unix":1512571508,"date_modified_unix":1634652841,"date_iso":"2017-12-06T14:45:08+00:00","content":"

Bots take care of many routine tasks at Wikipedia. The automated assistants greatly influence how the community interacts at the online encyclopedia. Wikipedians have learned to respond to the social effects of algorithms \u2013 for example by creating their own bot policy.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Wikipedia is a giant laboratory for exploring how algorithms and people can work together (see Part 1 of our series on Wikipedia bots: \u201cGuardians of Global Knowledge<\/a><\/strong>\u201d). Wikipedians working on the English-language Wikipedia put together an extensive set of guidelines for using automated bots soon after the site was launched. And while every Wikipedia user can run bots on their own computer to automatically change articles in the encyclopedia, anyone who does so without permission from the Wikipedia community risks having their account blocked.<\/p>\n

Wikipedia\u2019s six laws of robotics<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Wikimedia Foundation operates servers which volunteers can use to store their bots. The advantage is that programs can be tested there without doing any harm, and operators don\u2019t have to worry about damaging the infrastructure that runs the software. Bots are given certain privileges <\/a><\/strong>depending on the community in question. For example, they can make more changes per minute than a normal user is permitted to carry out, and their input is generally not checked for vandalism as often as that of human authors. Ultimately, each community working on Wikipedia\u2019s numerous language versions and sister projects decides for itself how it wants to engage with bots.<\/p>\n

To be granted the above privileges, however, the bots have to be approved by the community. A Bot Approvals Group decides which automated programs may run on the English-language Wikipedia. The group has put together six requirements that a bot must meet to be approved.<\/p>\n

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These criteria are the result of a long learning phase, since Wikipedians had the idea to at least partly automate, what is in\u00a0\u00a0 effect the repository of the world\u2019s knowledge, for quite a while. Yet while trying to do so they repeatedly encountered problems that made it necessary to reconsider the existing rules.<\/p>\n

Small mistakes with a big impact<\/strong><\/p>\n

The first example was the \u201crambot\u201d.<\/a><\/strong> Beginning in October 2002, it used data made available online by the US government to create articles about cities and towns not yet included in Wikipedia. The rudimentary entries created by rambot only contained basic information, such as location and population, which had been inserted into a simple template. On the one hand, the experiment was highly successful: rambot created over 30,000 new articles at a time when the English Wikipedia only had 50,000.<\/p>\n