The Lives of Bots

TL;DR

This paper explores the social and technical environment of Wikipedia's bots, focusing on policies, community governance, and conflicts, highlighting human roles in designing and managing automated agents within an open collaborative platform.

Contribution

It provides an in-depth analysis of Wikipedia's bot policies, the Bot Approvals Group, and a case study of early bot controversy, revealing human oversight in automated content moderation.

Findings

Bots enforce community rules and norms.

Human oversight is crucial in bot development and conflict resolution.

Wikipedia's open process reveals human work behind automation.

Abstract

Automated software agents --- or bots --- have long been an important part of how Wikipedia's volunteer community of editors write, edit, update, monitor, and moderate content. In this paper, I discuss the complex social and technical environment in which Wikipedia's bots operate. This paper focuses on the establishment and role of English Wikipedia's bot policies and the Bot Approvals Group, a volunteer committee that reviews applications for new bots and helps resolve conflicts between Wikipedians about automation. In particular, I examine an early bot controversy over the first bot in Wikipedia to automatically enforce a social norm about how Wikipedian editors ought to interact in discussion spaces. As I show, bots enforce many rules in Wikipedia, but humans produce these bots and negotiate rules around their operation. Because of the openness of Wikipedia's processes around automation, we can vividly observe the often-invisible human work involved in such algorithmic systems --- in stark contrast to most other user-generated content platforms.