http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~lam/papers/lam_group2010_wikipedia-group-decis…
:
"We also found that there have been two bots
(computer programs that edit Wikipedia)—BJBot and Jayden54Bot—that automatically
automatically notified article editors about AfD discussions and recruited them to
participate per the established policy. These bots performed AfD notifications for several
months, and offer us an opportunity to study the effect of recruitment that is purely
policy driven. We use a process like one described above to detect successful instances of
bot-initiated recruitment: if a recruitment bot edited a user’s talk page, and that user
!voted in an AfD within two days, then we consider that user to have been recruited by the
bot.
Using the above processes, we identified 8,464 instances of successful recruiting. Table
2 shows a summary of who did the recruiting, and how their recruits !voted. We see large
differences in !voting behavior, which suggests that there is bias in who people choose to
recruit. (From these data we cannot tell whether the bias is an intentional effort to
influence consensus, or the result of social network homophily [14].) Participants
recruited by keep !voters were about four times less likely to support deletion as those
recruited by delete !voters. The participants that bots recruited also appear unlikely to
support deletion, which reflects the policy bias we observed earlier."
--
gwern
http://www.gwern.net