Millions of edits on Wikipedia are performed exclusively by automated bots that routinely get into aggressive, years-long editing wars with each other over formatting rules.

A closer look

Millions of edits on Wikipedia are performed exclusively by automated bots that routinely get into aggressive, years-long editing wars with each other over formatting rules. When one bot is programmed to remove specific punctuation and another is programmed to add it back, they will silently revert each other's changes thousands of times without human intervention. The repository of all human knowledge is secretly a battlefield for pedantic software scripts fighting over whether a comma should be italicized. It is deeply poetic that humanity's greatest collaborative achievement is constantly being policed by emotionless algorithms wasting precious server electricity on petty grammatical disputes