Even good bots fight and a typology of Internet bots

Our new paper titled “Even good bots fight: The case of Wikipedia” has finally appeared on PLOS One.

There are two things that I particularly find worth-highlighting about this work. First, this is the first time that someone looks at an ecosystem of the Internet bots at scale using hard data and tries to come up with a typology of the Internet bots (see the figure). And second, the arrangement of our team that is a good example of multidisciplinary research in action: Milena Tsvetkova, the lead author is a sociologist by training. Ruth Garcia is a computer engineer, Luciano Floridi is a professor of Philosophy, and I have a PhD in physics.

If you find the paper too long, have a look at the University of Oxford press release, or the one by the Alan Turing Institute, where both Luciano and I are Faculty Fellows.

Among many media coverages of our work, I think the one in The Guardian is the closest to ideal.