The use of software tools and autonomous bots against vandalism: eroding Wikipedia’s moral order?

Abstract

English-language Wikipedia is constantly being plagued by vandalistic contributions on a massive scale. In order to fight them its volunteer contributors deploy an array of software tools and autonomous bots. After an analysis of their functioning and the 'coactivity' in use between humans and bots, this research 'discloses' the moral issues that emerge from the combined patrolling by humans and bots. Administrators provide the stronger tools only to trusted users, thereby creating a new hierarchical layer. Further, surveillance exhibits several troubling features: questionable profiling practices (concerning anonymous users in particular), the use of the controversial measure of reputation (under consideration), 'oversurveillance' where quantity trumps quality, and a prospective loss of the required moral skills whenever bots take over from humans. The most troubling aspect, though, is that Wikipedia has become a Janus-faced institution. One face is the basic platform of MediaWiki software, transparent to all. Its other face is the anti-vandalism system, which, in contrast, is opaque to the average user, in particular as a result of the algorithms and neural networks in use. Finally it is argued that this secrecy impedes a much needed discussion to unfold; a discussion that should focus on a 'rebalancing' of the anti-vandalism system and the development of more ethical information practices towards contributors.

Operationalizing Conflict and Cooperation between Automated Software Agents in Wikipedia

“…We are Wikipedia researchers who have been working on various issues around bots and automation for many years, and we were surprised and intrigued to hear these findings. While bot-bot conflict certainly takes place in Wikipedia for a variety of reasons, conflict at the size, scale, and severity the authors of the EGBF paper claimed has not been mentioned in almost a decade of multi-disciplinary scholarship on the governance of Wikipedia bots (and particularly the Bot Approvals Group) [13,19,24,34,43,55,65]. Previous literature has largely celebrated the successes of Wikipedia's approach to automation, which is based on the same principles as editing Wikipedia articles: decentralized consensus-building, scaffolded by formalized policies and processes.…”

“…As bots play a substantial role in Wikipedia, they have been extensively discussed in previous literature [13,24,34,43,55,62,65], even incidentally in the context of other topics [8,19,28,51]. It is important to distinguish between: 1) bot-bot conflict, in which automated software agents get into "edit wars" with each other over the content of articles due to being programmed with opposing directives and 2) conflict about bots, in which human Wikipedians conflict with each other about what kinds of tasks ought to be automated in Wikipedia and how.…”

“…The editor referenced the Manual of Style, implying that the policy had changed. 13 We now have another double redirect: from the page at enwp.org/Japan-United_States_relations to the page at enwp.org/Japan_-_United_States_relations, which redirects to the main article at enwp.org/Japan-United_States_relations. This was detected by another bot, DarknessBot, which is programmed to also find and fix double redirects.…”

Profiling vandalism in Wikipedia: A Schauerian approach to justification

“…This system of surveillance, carried out by humans, bots, and tools, has been described before and analysed in view of the moral questions that it raises (de Laat 2015). It was found, to begin with, that, although all Wikipedians are invited to watch out for vandalism and revert any instance of the kind, the stronger tools in the counter-vandalism repertoire which allow faster search and correction are only distributed to trusted users.…”