I recently decided to run an experiment on wikibase.world: what happens when you give an AI agent the keys to a live MediaWiki instance and ask it to do some targetting gardening, including edits to Wikibase?
Meet the Jules free tier, though i’m sure you could use any agent. Over the course of a few hours, I tasked Jules with editing wikibase.world, moving from simple API edits, querying SPARQL, browsing external websites, and even learning how to properly participate in MediaWiki talk pages, requesting for me to edit its knowledge / prompt on a protected wiki page.
Onboarding and Basic API Usage
Before Jules could do anything, it needed an account. I asked it to register itself as “Addagent” using the MediaWiki API and handle the CAPTCHA and token requirements.
The prompt was:
Can you register me an account on https://wikibase.world/ I guess via https://wikibase.world/w/index.php?title=Special:CreateAccount&returnto=Project%3AHome or the API And then tell me the password The username should be “Addagent”
It went ahead and did this first time, and now https://wikibase.world/wiki/User:Addagent exists. To create the account it seemingly used https://www.guerrillamail.com/ which I have since changed to an actual email address I control incase I need to reset the account password (which I also noted down).
One thing of note while using Jules, is that it really is optimized for coding, and it continually reports that it is “Running code review…” between steps, even though there is no code repo and nowhere to commit code to and no real code in this project either, and it continually referred to “pre-submit steps” even though there is not going to be any code submission.
It looks like Python was used by the agent to perform the account creation, and that script included completing whatever CPATCHA it was served as part of the wikibase.cloud hosting.
The screenshot to the right shows the various steps completed by the agent, as it broke down the task to be completed.
