Operationalizing Conflict and Cooperation between Automated Software Agents in Wikipedia: A Replication and Expansion of 'Even Good Bots Fight'

Abstract

This paper replicates, extends, and refutes conclusions made in a study published in PLoS ONE ("Even Good Bots Fight"), which claimed to identify substantial levels of conflict between automated software agents (or bots) in Wikipedia using purely quantitative methods. By applying an integrative mixed-methods approach drawing on trace ethnography, we place these alleged cases of bot-bot conflict into context and arrive at a better understanding of these interactions. We found that overwhelmingly, the interactions previously characterized as problematic instances of conflict are typically better characterized as routine, productive, even collaborative work. These results challenge past work and show the importance of qualitative/quantitative collaboration. In our paper, we present quantitative metrics and qualitative heuristics for operationalizing bot-bot conflict. We give thick descriptions of kinds of events that present as bot-bot reverts, helping distinguish conflict from non-conflict. We computationally classify these kinds of events through patterns in edit summaries. By interpreting found/trace data in the socio-technical contexts in which people give that data meaning, we gain more from quantitative measurements, drawing deeper understandings about the governance of algorithmic systems in Wikipedia. We have also released our data collection, processing, and analysis pipeline, to facilitate computational reproducibility of our findings and to help other researchers interested in conducting similar mixed-method scholarship in other platforms and contexts.

References

1. Phil Agre. 1997. Beyond the mirror world: Privacy and the representational practices of computing. Technology and Privacy: The New Landscape. The MIT Press, Cambridge.
2. Solon Barocas, Sophie Hood, and Malte Ziewitz. 2013. Governing Algorithms: A Provocation Piece. SSRN (2013).
3. Jeremy Birnholtz, Colin Fitzpatrick, Mark Handel, and Jed R. Brubaker. 2014. Identity, Identification and Identifiability: The Language of Self-presentation on a Location-based Mobile Dating App. In Proc MobileHCI 2014. ACM, 3--12.
4. Jorge Luis Borges. 2015 {1946}. On Exactitude in Science. Collected Fictions. Penguin. https://kwarc.info/teaching/TDM/Borges.pdf
5. Geoffrey Bowker. 2005. Memory Practices in the Sciences. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
6. Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star. 1999. Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. MIT Press, Cambridge.
7. Jed R. Brubaker and Gillian R. Hayes. 2011. SELECT * FROM USER: infrastructure and socio-technical representation Proc CSCW 2011. ACM Press, New York, 369.
8. Moira Burke and Robert Kraut. 2008. Mopping up Proceedings of the ACM 2008 conference on Computer supported cooperative work - CSCW '08. ACM Press, New York, 27.
9. Brian Butler, Elisabeth Joyce, Jacqueline Pike, Elisabeth Joyce, and Brian Butler. 2008. Don't look now, but we've created a bureaucracy: the nature and roles of policies and rules in wikipedia. In Proc CHI 2008. ACM, Florence, 1101--1110. lot2.org
10. Taha Yasseri, Robert Sumi, András Rung, András Kornai, and János Kertész. 2012. Dynamics of Conflicts in Wikipedia. PLoS ONE, Vol. 7, 6 (jun. 2012), e38869. 1932--6203
11. J. Yates and W.J. Orlikowski. 1992. Genres of organizational communication: a structurational approach to studying communication and media. Academy of Management Review Vol. 17 (1992), 299--326.

Index Terms

• Human-centered computing

  • Collaborative and social computing

    • Collaborative and social computing systems and tools

      • Wikis

    • Collaborative and social computing theory, concepts and paradigms

      • Computer supported cooperative work

    • Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing

• Social and professional topics

  • Professional topics

    • Computing and business

      • Automation

      • Socio-technical systems