Bots and the M-Statistic

NOTE: we will be meeting on FRIDAY at 10AM, due to the Veteran’s Day Holiday.

Topics

This week’s assignments will guide you through the following topics:

  • Analyze the behavior of wikipedia bots using the M-Statistic
  • Understand the role bots play in developing wikipedia

Reading

Please read the following:

  • Milena Tsvetkova,Ruth García-Gavilanes,Luciano Floridi,Taha Yasseri. “Even Good Bots Fight.” 2017 PLOS ONE. [Link]
  • R. Stuart Geiger and Aaron Halfaker. “Operationalizing conflict and cooperation between automated software agents in Wikipedia: A replication and expansion of Even Good Bots Fight.” 2017 Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction [Link]
  • Read the Bot Policy page.

Tasks

Complete the following tasks:

  • Continue to compute/optimize the M-Statistic for all English Wikipedia Articles.
  • Perform an EDA on bot edit activity on Wikipedia.
  • Describe the role(s) that RussBot plays on wikipedia. Can you find it in the light-dumps data? Can you find a pattern to when it edits? Does that pattern match with the user-page?

Weekly Questions

Answer the standard participation questions

And, remember, the EDA on the english light dump data is due this coming Friday!