This paper is a very interesting inside look at how the inner cogs of Wikipeda functions, particularly relating to how vandalism is managed with the help of automated software tools. The tools developed unofficially by Wikipedia contributors were created out of necessity in order to a) make it easier to identify bad actors, b) automate and speed up reversions of vandalism, and c) give power to the non-experts to police obvious vandalism such as changing or deleting sections without needing a subject matter expert to do a full review of the article. The paper uses trace ethnography in order to study the usage of these tools and puts forth an interesting case study of a vandal defacing various articles and how through distributed actions by various volunteers, assisted by these tools, the vandal was identified, warned for their repeated offenses, and finally banned as their egregious actions continued, all within the span of 15 minutes and no explicit coordination among the volunteers.
I find this to be a fascinating look into distributed cognition in action, where in multiple independent actors are able to take independent action that produce a cohesive result (in the case study, multiple volunteers and automated tools identifying a vandal and issuing warnings, ultimately resulting in their ban). I find I’m thinking the work of these tools as kind of an equivalent to human body’s unconscious activities. For example, the act of walking is incredibly complex involving precise coordination of hundreds of muscles all moving at the right moments. However, we do not have to think any harder than “I want to get from here to there” and our body handles the rest. That’s kind of what it feels like these tools are, something that handles the complex busywork and leave the big decisions to us. I am wondering though how things have changed from 2009. The paper mentions that the bots tend to ignore changes made by other bots because presumably those other bots are being managed by other volunteers but the bot configuration can be changed so that it explicitly monitors other bots. I wonder how much of that functionality is used now because I am sure Wikipedia now has to deal with a lot more politically motivated vandalism, and much of it is being done by bots. Reddit is a big victim of this, so it is not hard to imagine Wikipedia faces the same problem. Of course, the adversarial bots would be a lot more clever than just pretending to be a friendly bot because that might not cut it anymore. It’s still an important thing to think about.
- How would the functionality of Huggle and its ilk fare in the space of Reddit’s automoderator, and vice versa? Are they dealing with fundamentally different things or is there overlap?
- How has dealing with vandalism changed on Wikipedia in the decade since this paper was published?
- Is there a place for a heirarchy of bots, where lower level bots scan for vandalism and higher level bots make the decisions for banning, all with minimal human intervention? Or will there always need active human participation?
I agree with your comment about the fact that the bots tend to ignore changes made by other bots as they assume it is managed by other volunteers. This assumption is a bit risky to make at a point where social media is filled with malicious bots trying to fulfill their agenda. One solution could be to attend to all comments and treat them the same. The second solution is trying to classify the bots from their past actions into harmful and harmless bots. Again, this is bound to take time and effort. First, we need to train a classifier on samples of comments that each kind of bot might produce and then finally implement them.