Signal to Noise, part II

Robot Moderator?
Image via Wikimedia CommonsA while back, in my post Attacking the noise, I described ROBOT9000, automated moderating technology introduced at one of xkcd's IRC channels as an interesting experiment. Apparently the idea has legs.

While reading a very interesting New York Times piece on trolling, The Trolls Among Us (which, by the way, "outed" several trolls, giving their real life identities or information sufficient for a determined person to track them down.... perhaps more on that later... the topic has come up on various WMF wikis and discussion groups) I ran across the tidbit (on page 7 of the piece), that ROBOT9000 has come to 4chan.

Sure enough, there is now a moderated subforum at 4chan called ROBOT9000 (or /r9k/ ).

Dan must be proud!

I for one welcome our new robot masters, if they can improve signal to noise...

Do you?

xkcd and obsession

Sample xkcd comic.
Image from CommonsOK, so xkcd is a webcomic. If you don't know what that means, follow the links.

Anyway, the author of xkcd understands Wikipedia. Consider this comic. (Is there anyone reading this blog who hasn't seen it yet? Oh please! Cap yourself immediately) Consider this reference to xkcd from Wikipedia's Administrator's Noticeboard/Incidents... clearly Wikipedia administrators understand where he's coming from too.

The xkcd author surely understands obsession. Consider this image... how long did it take someone (him) to draw that? Any why? On a whiteboard, no less. Sure, it's a great joke, but was the time spent worth the laughs? To him it was.

Some of you may know that webcomics got me more involved in Wikipedia than just a drive by fixer-upper... reading webcomics used to be one of my obsessions. LEGO still is. But over time, it seems that obsessions change and shift. What drives obsessions? What causes them to change? These are good questions. And important ones to many hobbies...

Wikipedia would not survive without a core of people who were not at least slightly obsessed with it. The same is true of many other hobbies... the NMRA relies on a core of folk who give their time and energy to an organization that ultimately, is all about something not essential to survival. But ultimately, that's a tribute to the success of our civilization. Instead of being obsessed with gathering food and staying alive, that can take up only part of our time and attention, allowing most of it to focus on what really interests us.

What are your obsessions?

Attacking the noise...

Xchat IRC client
Image from Wikimedia Commons...in signal to noise ratio.

I forgot about this, and I'm glad I remembered. It seems that there are IRC channels where fans of xkcd hang out and chat. ( xkcd is a webcomic. If you don't know what that means, follow the links.) Oddly enough, (or maybe not, see my post about obsession) this is popular enough that the channels were suffering from a surfeit of inane comments. Channel regulars were apparently not amused.

Turns out my fellow LEGO fan Dan Boger, alias zigdon (I have no idea why) a wizard Perl coder, and creator of the boffo Peeron.com LEGO set database coded up a bot... what sort of a bot, you say? Well, go read the source code and figure it out!

OK done? Figured it out? Your perl-foo is strong.

Everyone else: It's a bot to enforce originality. Say something in the channel that has been said before, and you get devoiced for 4 seconds. Say another something that has been said before, and the devoice quadruples. Not just something that YOU said before, something that ANYONE said before.
)
Read more about how this came to pass, and then laugh with me. Note, others have blogged about this as well...

I actually got to try this out, and it's surprisingly difficult to not get zapped by the bot. Think you can do better (warning, theoretically, it gets harder as time goes by, all the obvious things to say have been used up)? Try it and see, assuming you have an IRC nickname set up.

Wikimedia IRC channels need this! Well, some of them do. Maybe not all of them :) I suspect that the stewards channel needs people to be able to say !steward more than just the one time. But #wikipedia REALLY needs this! You know it does.