Bot battles over Wikipedia

In recent years there has been a huge increase in botoin the internet. Starting with botoin indexing wspoThese are predictable automatons, programmed for a specific purpose, which work with search engines, through chatbots serving the online customer, to bots editing and changing content available on the web.

Little is known to us about the interactions between rotrong bots. However, as scientists report, the world of the Internet has turned into an environment in which theorym there is constant fighting botoin between.

Bots are ordinary programs. Their name comes from the word – robot. They are predictable, programmed automata, programmed for a de-identified purpose, whichore do not have emotions or decision-making abilities and interactions between them should be predictable and seamless. This has been verified by researchers from Oxford and the Alan Turing Institute.

Researchers analyzed interactions between algorithms on the pages of the largest online encyclopedia – Wikipedia. The period of analysis was 2001-2010. Scientists considered 13 language versions of the site.

The analysis shows that the bots are in constant battles with each other. Although they are created to support Wikipedia and make corrections of errorsow, change the content edited by a competing bot to their own. Such wars can last for years.

Most often, these peculiar wars are fought over naming. While one of the botow after editing the content sets the name of e.g. „Persian Gulf”, The other re-edits the text and changes the name to „Arabian Gulf”. Such examplesow is much more, such as the name „Pacific Ocean” i „Pacific”, o ktorą also fought battles. This applies to roThe use of different language versions of encyclopedias.

In the English version of Wikipedia there are about two thousand boots, which ore examining some 42 million pages.

The results of the analysis of scents were published on „PLOS ONE”.