De-botting Wikipedia

Project members: Anne Helmond and Kim

Research questions: What is the bot activity per type within the Global Warming Sphere? How can we visualize the prominent role bots play within Wikipedia?

Method

1. Take a Wikipedia entry (in this case Climate Change)
2. Use the Wikipedia Bot Edits Scraper to take out all the bot edits.
3. Manually look at the edits made by tools-assisted human editors that cannot be classified using the log. It is interesting to note that 53% (180 out of 339) of the bot edits were made by tools-assisted human editors.
4. Classify bot edits according the categorization by Wikipedia:

• 1.1 Various tasks
• 1.2 Maintenance-related Bots
• 1.3 Disambiguation Bots
• 1.4 Interwiki Bots

Findings

If we use the classification provided by Wikipedia most bot edits within the Climate Change entry are maintenance related:

maintenance (251) disambiguation (65) interwiki (21) unknown (1)

If we adjust this classification and see vandalism as a separate category instead of including it with maintenance a different picture emergies. Most bot edits within the Climate Change entry are vandalism related:

vandalism (184) maintenance (67) disambiguation (65) interwiki (21) unknown (1)

Bots responsible for reverting vandalism:

cluebot (33) raymondarritt (21) voabotii (19) brusegadi (15) kimdabelsteinpetersen (10) antivandalbot (7) tawkerbot2 (6) martinbot (4) teadrinker (4) brianga (3) vsmith (3) canthusus (2) wimt (2) vanhelsing (2) quinsareth (2) arthana (2) mhking (2) coffee (1) countervandalismbot (1) dragonflysixtyseven (1) drtllbrg (1) abrech (1) geologyguy (1) bjweeks (1) andonico (1) bookofjude (1) caulde (1) jespinos (1) soumyasch (1) smc (1) thekman (1) titoxd (1) voyagerfan5761 (1) samkorn (1) royboy (1) hennesseypatrick (1) hu12 (1) nibuod (1) viriditas (1) aliasflood (1) amitch (1) cireland (1) chrisg (1) iriskawling (1) ric (1) leafyplant (1) dipics (1) switchercat (1) meekywiki (1) primecupeevee (1) redact (1) stephenb (1) mcgeddon (1) nivix (1) discospinster (1) cklostsword (1) katalaveno (1) leuko (1) tbadger (1) dand (1) pumpmeup (1) recurringdreams (1) sjp (1) superbeecat (1) mbimmler (1)

Check bots per category:

• 1.1 Various tasks
• 1.2 Maintenance-related Bots
• 1.3 Disambiguation Bots
• 1.4 Interwiki Bots

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Registered_bots

OR

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots/Status

OR

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:BOTNAME

for descriptions

OR

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:BOTNAME

for descriptions

OR

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/BOTNAME

for actions

In Bubble Lines tool.

Anti-vandalism bot activity within a disputed article

The first part of the de-botting Wikipedia research showed that the anti-vandalism bots play a prominent role in the Climate Change entry. In order to show what Wikipedia would look like without these bots we made a small animation of the disputed Climate Change article. We used the same method as described above but added a few steps. We looked specifically at the anti-vandalism bots within the Climate Change entry and reverted the edits they made. By reverting anti-vandalism bot edits and highlighting the vandalism we get a sense of what Wikipedia would look like without bots.

Methodology

1. Take disputed Wikipedia entry (in this case Climate Change)
2. Use the Wikipedia Bot Edits Scraper to take out all the bot edits.
3. Manually look at the edits made by tools-assisted human editors that cannot be classified using the log.
4. Classify bot edits according the categorization by Wikipedia
5. Go into the history of the Climate Change entry and look up all the edits made by anti-vandalism bot
6. Take a snapshot of the reverted version of the entry
7. Highlight the edit
8. Compile a movie (animated gif) of the screenshots

The animation shows the edits that have been removed by (anti-vandalism) bots over time.