The Wikipedia Contradiction
If someone is an expert in their field, they are too busy to fanatically edit Wikipedia every day.
And if someone has the time to fanatically edit Wikipedia every day, then they cannot be an expert in their field.
People built AI bots to improve Wikipedia. Then they started squabbling in petty edit wars, sigh
An investigation into Wikipedia bots has confirmed the automated editing software can be just as pedantic and petty as humans are – often engaging in online spats that can continue for years. What's interesting is that bots behave differently depending on which language version of Wikipedia they work on: some become more …
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Thursday 23rd February 2017 20:48 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: The Wikipedia Contradiction
If someone is an expert in their field, they are too busy to fanatically edit Wikipedia every day.
If someone is an expert in their field, they are also too busy to engage in edit wars with cretins. You could have a PhD and thirty years experience researching the subject, but you'll be up against Bobby Joe who knows fuck all except that he is right and you are wrong, and he's got nothing else to do all day.
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Friday 24th February 2017 11:03 GMT Paul Kinsler
Re: You could have a PhD and thirty years experience researching the subject
I don't have quite thirty years yet, but I do have a PhD, and I keep an eye on the rss feeds for several electromagnetism-related wikipedia pages. Mostly the changes are benign, or random vandalism which is reverted by bot, or dealt with by somebody else, so the net workload is almost vanishingly small, ... unless I have a burst of enthusiasm for improving something.
However, I dare say it might be different if I were to take an interest in more controversial subjects.
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Thursday 23rd February 2017 21:41 GMT Notas Badoff
Bot are not people, people are sometimes their bots
There is a portion of people writing/guiding bots that are attracted to it for reasons that also should disqualify them from actually running them. Excessively precise and sure of themselves, they can easily maul texts and overrun anyone's ability to oversee exactly what they are doing.
In any collective exercise, the people who can not play well with others simply must be excused from having to do so. I've seen at least two obsessive bot drivers banned from WP in the last 2 years. In spite of all good they had done the project, they finally convinced everyone that they couldn't be trusted to listen to *anyone* else.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
