vignette.md

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.

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Or this is what we what we might conclude if we were to analyze activity from Wikipedia’s database of edits without understanding the broader socio-technical context of these activities.

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Addbot is one of the best examples of a well-coordinated bot operation in an open online space. The bot’s source code and operational status are well-documented, it is operated in line with the various bot policies that different language versions can set for themselves, it is run by a known maintainer, and it is performing a massive task that would be a waste of human attention. The bot ran for a short period and completed the work as planned with no major objections or issue. As of August 2013, the bot had completed its task and the Addbot account was not further used by Adam Shoreland to do work outside of the scope of its approval.