“I was surprised how upset some people got”: A conversation with the creator of TomWikiAssist, the bot that edited Wikipedia

Behind the scenes at Wikipedia, some editors were alarmed recently when they saw a flurry of edits and new articles by a contributor known as TomWikiAssist . It turned out that Tom was a bot and was making edits and creating articles that the bot believed were interesting. The editors then blocked Tom from doing any more editing or writing. The more the editors looked into Tom, the more alarmed th