Although bots are useful to Wikipedia because they can does numerous edits fastidiously and fix pesky grammar errors, there is a negative side that will raise some questions about their functionality. Now that bots are included in the Wikipedia community, I wonder if bots will be allowed to participate in the hierarchy? On average bots can make over a million edits per month, whereas the top human contributor (“Antandrus”) just reached about 100,000 edits over a period of seven years. Thus, if bots are ever allowed to be included into the social hierarchy within Wikipedia, all of the human Wikipedians would be doomed. Luckily, this has not happened (or has not happened yet).
Do you think that if bots have the power to rule our encyclopedic information, humans will no longer seem useful?
Good thing these bots have an emergency shut off button haha:
These bots are both funny and interesting. Has there been any feedback from Wiki admins about how they feel about the bots? Are they afraid they may be out of a job at some point?
ReplyDeleteI'm curious as to how bots can correct grammar. I'm not surprised that Wikipedia has an official 'grammar' they use, but bots seem to have some trouble with advanced grammar. I guess they can handle the common errors people would make though.
ReplyDeleteI don't see anything wrong with the use of bots to make edits. Like you pointed out, they are far more efficient in performing edits than humans. If they are making simple edits, there's no need to have an actual person do it.
What scares me are bots that are being used to generate news article using complex algorithms. I've even seen an article in a sport section that was written completely by a bot programmed to input scores and use certain keywords. I could tell that it was a little off in terms of syntax, but it was perfectly comprehensible. Some are afraid that bots are going to eliminate the need for journalists to write certain articles, which is not something I would like.
I don't know if humans will no longer seem useful if bots some day rule our encyclopedic information, but I do think they won't be able to perform jobs involving that knowledge anymore. Once a machine can do something, it seems like the human component is no longer necessary. After the initial overhead, a robot is probably going to be less expensive over time than a human employee you have to pay forever, so I'm sure the people in charge of hiring would much rather take the cheaper option.
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