Between March 5th and 25th, 2013, one of the darkest periods in the robot history of Wikipedia occurred. A bot called Addbot, operated by Adam Shoreland, an employee of the Berlin-based Wikimedia Deutschland, committed the most aggressive bot-on-bot revert conflict events ever recorded. In a flurry of inefficiency and inefficacy, Addbot reverted 146,614 contributions other bots had made to English Wikipedia, removing links between different language versions of Wikipedia articles, which had been automatically curated and updated by dozens of different bots. Over a 20-day rampage, the bot annihilated their work and the work of their maintainers. The fact that such a massively destructive act could take place without being stopped is evidence that Wikipedia had failed to govern bot behaviors and that bots in Wikipedia are out of control.
Last active
May 2, 2017 17:41
-
-
Save halfak/6ba5b84ca7aca3b8adabc5aa51a4d286 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Sign up for free
to join this conversation on GitHub.
Already have an account?
Sign in to comment
The next paragraph continues:
The end of the introduction finishes with: