|Talks|

Armies of Bots and Humans in the Lab: Edit Wars in Wikipedia

Visiting speaker
Past Talk
Taha Yasseri
Senior Research Fellow (Associate Professor) in Computational Social Science at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford
Aug 16, 2017
2:00 pm
Aug 16, 2017
2:00 pm
In-person
4 Thomas More St
London E1W 1YW, UK
The Roux Institute
Room
100 Fore Street
Portland, ME 04101
Network Science Institute
2nd floor
Network Science Institute
11th floor
177 Huntington Ave
Boston, MA 02115
Network Science Institute
2nd floor
Room
58 St Katharine's Way
London E1W 1LP, UK

Talk recording

Despite the enormous importance, conflicts and wars in human societies are less studied within the framework of scientific methods. It is hard to have realistic controlled experiments and even observational data are very sparse. However, the emergence of online technologies and their integration into different aspects of our individual and societal lives, has brought about a change. In large-scale online collaborative projects such as Wikipedia where millions of people work together to produce a collection of the "whole human knowledge", conflicts and edit wars are inevitable. In this talk we review some of the empirical analyses and theoretical modelling that we have done on Wikipedia edit wars between human and robot editors in different language editions.

About the speaker
Taha Yasseri is a Senior Research Fellow (Associate Professor) in Computational Social Science at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, a Faculty Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute for Data Science, and a Research Fellow in Humanities and Social Sciences at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. Dr Yasseri graduated from the Department of Physics at the Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 2005, where he also obtained his MSc in 2006, working on localization in scale free complex networks. In 2007, he moved to the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Göttingen, Germany, where he completed his PhD in Complex Systems Physics in 2010. Prior to coming to Oxford, he spent two years as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics.
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Aug 16, 2017