CampariVA

Hi!

Thanks for visiting my brand new and very blank talk page. I am am assistant professor at the University of Cambridge and am studying bots on Wikipedia. In general I study how technology affects organizations and work, and am specifically excited about anything related to automation, AI, and simulation technologies. I'm working with Bei Yan

Your BOTN post

Hi Virginia! I saw your request for interviewees at WP:BOTN and wanted to volunteer! You can email me and we can set up a zoom call if that's easiest for you, otherwise we can text chat on IRC where my nick is the same as my username here. I saw that your research question is pretty specific to bots, but if you're interested in the "old" internet roots of our policies and culture you should meet User:Graham87 who is our resident m:WikiArchaeologist. He knows his way around our archives and can probably point you to relevant pages or give you an oral history. If you're looking to publish your results in the future, you should check out v:WikiJournal of Humanities where we're trying to set up a peer reviewed, open access publication in the wiki style for use on Wikipedia and other projects! I look forward to chatting, and I'm glad you like our community so much! — Wug·a·po·des​ 01:13, 18 December 2020 (UTC)

@Wugapodes: Wow, thanks for the vote of confidence ... but as for that specific question I wouldn't really know how to answer it! All I really know about the early history of bots was that the first bot that caused a lot of controversy was Rambot. Graham87 02:13, 18 December 2020 (UTC)

@Wugapodes: Awesome to hear aboutv:WikiJournal of Humanities . We will definitely look to publish there! The academic publishing cycle is so slow, and we're always interested in finding other places to share and discuss ideas. Stories, esp oral histories, about bots that were controversial are right in our wheelhouse. Wikipedia is also such an interesting place to study bots because you all have been working with them for so long and have so much experience trying different things out. CampariVA (talk) 18:13, 18 December 2020 (UTC)

I'll email you and I'm happy to help out as much as I can, but in some ways I'm not sure I'm really the best person for this ... I've never run a bot in my life! There are random things I know periphorally, as a perennial lurker, but I don't feel comfortable giving a full story on them. For example I don't think you can write a history of bots on Wikipedia without mentioning BetacommandBot, especially known for work on non-free content criteria enforcement, and the eventual banning of its owner, who was later known as Δ. The first person I can think of to tell that story would be Hammersoft, but there are probably many others. Also, please make sure you sign all your messages with four tildes ("~~~~"). I'll ping Wugapodes properly while I'm here. Graham87 18:25, 18 December 2020 (UTC)

Lurkers welcome! Or... lurkers welcome? We're interested in lots of different perspectives on bots. Thank you for the syntax tips- I'm still figuring out how to do this all correctly and I appreciate all feedback as I'm learning the new language. I've been super curious about BetacommandBot CampariVA (talk) 18:35, 18 December 2020 (UTC)

I assume you've seen Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Δ? Particularly the 2014 and 2017 discussions ... which should provide you with leads. Graham87 18:42, 18 December 2020 (UTC)

Less controversially, I didn't even know about this page myself ... but there's Wikipedia:History of Wikipedia bots. Graham87 18:44, 18 December 2020 (UTC)

Excellent! So far we've scraped all discussions from the Bots noticeboard and from the Village Pump. So any other page where bot-related discussions are so useful as we are trying to gather as much as possible. CampariVA (talk) 19:03, 18 December 2020 (UTC)

You'll probably also want all the archives linked from Wikipedia talk:Bots. Graham87 02:35, 19 December 2020 (UTC)

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