By June 2006, anti-vandalism bots were widespread. "When I look at these tools, I really think that they saved Wikipedia from a sad defeat at the hands of random people," says Aaron Halfaker, a PhD candidate and researcher working for the Wikimedia Foundation. Without the evolving anti-vandalism tools, that trend could have continued editors would simply be overwhelmed by defacers. While the chance was always minuscule - measured in thousandths - it had increased exponentially over just three years. One study examined the probability that a typical Wikipedia visit between 20 showed a damaged article. Crude by today’s standards, AntiVandalBot nonetheless saved editors time and attention. Obvious vandalism could be removed automatically, while borderline cases went to another program, VandalProof, for human intervention. As the name suggests, it was a first attempt at automated vandalism protection: using a relatively simple set of rules, it monitored recent edits and intervened accordingly. In response, four Wikipedians built what would become known as AntiVandalBot. "When I look at these tools, I really think that they saved Wikipedia from a sad defeat at the hands of random people." Using open proxies, multiple user accounts, and possibly a bot, the Squidward Vandal bedeviled Wikipedians, at one point bragging via email, "I am a computer programmer and I know all the codes in the world." He or she also claimed to be a new editor who’d gone rogue after being accused of sabotage.
Someone began blanking pages and replacing them with an image of Squidward Tentacles, the SpongeBob Squarepants character.
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Wikipedia was discovering how to manage itself.Īround the same time, it faced what was probably the first example of ongoing malicious edits. Over the next several months, the rate of new articles created slowed, while the cull of unworthy articles increased. In the fall of 2006, Jimmy Wales gave a keynote speech calling on Wikipedians to focus on article quality over article quantity. Wikipedia’s shortcomings, both as an information source and as a self-organizing community, were becoming apparent. The increased attention brought a flood of new users with all of the attendant headaches: self-promotion, amateurish additions, and outright vandalism. No longer an obscure internet experiment, it had gone mainstream. Within four years, the English Wikipedia had more than 750,000 articles.
When Nupedia floundered, founders Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger pivoted to a crowdsourced encyclopedia. Wikipedia launched in 2001 from the ashes of expert-penned Nupedia. Rise of Wikipedia and the coming of the bots Beneath its calm exterior, Wikipedia is a battlezone, and these are its front lines. As Wikipedia has grown in size and complexity, so has the task of quality control today that responsibility falls to a cadre of cleverly programmed robots and “cyborgs” - software-assisted volunteers who spend hours patrolling recent edits. Within minutes if not seconds, bad edits are “reverted,” banished to a seldom-seen revision history. Harding’s middle initial stands for “gangsta.” Mostly, though, it’s predictably uninteresting - shout-outs, profane opinions, keyboard-mashed gibberish - happening thousands of times a day over more than 4 million articles.īut you’ll likely never see any of it. Sometimes the mischief is directed, as when The Oatmeal encouraged readers to include Thomas Edison under possible references for “douchebag,” or when Stephen Colbert sends his viewers out to alter “Wikiality” by, say, “proving,” that Warren G. Wikipedia is the encyclopedia “anyone can edit,” and as of this writing it’s had nearly 700 million edits - not all of them well-meaning. Around that time, an unnamed user defaced the Love Holy Trinity Blessed Mission page, writing, “The LHTBM is nothing but a sect that ruins peoples lives!!!” Four minutes later, someone changed the title of Battlefield 4 to “Kentucky Friend Chicken and a Pizza Hut.” Three minutes after that, the Horrible Histories page had scrawled across it a dire warning: “You need to get off wikipedia or you will DIEEEE.” At midnight on February 13th, 2014, a Wikipedia user named Lightningawesome added to the list of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic characters a lengthy biography of Lightning Dash, a capricious, lovable filly existing only in fan fiction.
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