How does one cite emails in ACM proceedings format?
:)
On Sunday, May 18, 2014, R.Stuart Geiger <sgeiger(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Tsk tsk tsk, Brian. When the revolution comes,
bot discriminators will
get no mercy. :-)
But seriously, my tl;dr: instead of asking if an account is or isn't a
bot, ask if a set of edits are or are not automated
Great responses so far: searching usernames for *bot will exclude non-bot
users who were registered before the username policy change (although *Bot
is a bit better), and the logging table is a great way to collect bot
flags. However, Scott is right -- the bot flag (or *Bot username) doesn't
signify a bot, it signifies a bureaucrat recognizing that a user account
successfully went through the Bot Approval Group process. If I see an
account with a bot flag, I can generally assume the edits that account
makes are initiated by an automated software agent. This is especially the
case in the main namespace. The inverse assumption is not nearly as easy: I
can't assume that every edit made from an account *without* a bot flag was
*not* an automated edit.
About unauthorized bots: yes, there are a relatively small number of
Wikipedians who, on occasion, run fully-automated, continuously-operating
bots without approval. Complicating this, if someone is going to take
the time to build and run a bot, but isn't going to create a separate
account for it, then it is likely that they are also using that account to
do non-automated edits. Sometimes new bot developers will run an
unauthorized bot under their own account during the initial stages of
development, and only later in the process will they create a separate bot
account and seek formal approval and flagging. It can get tricky when you
exclude all the edits from an account for being automated based on a single
suspicious set of edits.
More commonly, there are many more people who use automated batch tools
like AutoWikiBrowser to support one-off tasks, like mass find-and-replace
or category cleanup. Accounts powered by AWB are technically not bots,
only because a human has to sit there and click "save" for every batch edit
that is made. Some people will create a separate bot account for AWB
work and get it approved and flagged, but many more will not bother. Then
there are people using semi-automated, human-in-the-loop tools like Huggle
to do vandal fighting. I find that the really hard question is whether
you include or exclude these different kinds of 'cyborgs', because it
really makes you think hard about what exactly you're measuring. Is
someone who does a mass find-and-replace on all articles in a category a
co-author of each article they edit? Is a vandal fighter patrolling the
recent changes feed with Huggle a co-author of all the articles they edit
when they revert vandalism and then move on to the next diff? What about
somebody using rollback in the web browser? If so, what is it that makes
these entities authors and ClueBot NG not an author?
When you think about it, user accounts are actually pretty remarkable in
that they allow such a diverse set of uses and agents to be attributed to a
single entity. So when it comes to identifying automation, I personally
think it is better to shift the unit of analysis from the user account to
the individual edit. A bot flag lets you assume all edits from an account
are automated, but you can use a range of approaches to identifying sets of
automated edits from non-flagged accounts. Then I have a set of regex SQL
queries in the Query Library [1] which parses edit summaries for the traces
that AWB, Huggle, Twinkle, rollback, etc. automatically leave by default.
You can also use the edit session approach like Scott has suggested -- Aaron
and I found a few unauthorized bots in our edit session study [2], and we
were even using a more aggressive break, with no more than a 60 minute gap
between edits. To catch short bursts of bulk edits, you could look at large
numbers of edits made in a short period of time -- I'd say more than 7 main
namespace edits a minute for 10 minutes would be a hard rate for even a
very aggressive vandal fighter to maintain with Huggle.
I'll conclude by saying that different kinds of automated editing
techniques are different ways of participating in and contributing to
Wikipedia. To systematically exclude automated edits is to remove a very
important, meaningful, and heterogeneous kind of activity from view. These
activities constitute a core part of what Wikipedia is, particularly
those forms of automation which the community has explicitly authorized and
recognized. Now, we researchers inevitably have to selectively reveal
and occlude -- a co-authorship network based on main namespace edits also
excludes talk page discussions and conflict resolution, and this also
constitutes a core part of what Wikipedia is. It isn't wrong per se to
exclude automated edits, and it is certainly much worse to not recognize
that they exist at all. However, I always appreciate seeing how the
analysis would be different if bots were not excluded. The fact that
there are these weird users which absolutely dominate a co-authorship
network graph if you don't filter them out is pretty amazing, at least to
me.
Best,
Stuart
[1]
https://wiki.toolserver.org/view/MySQL_queries#Automated_tool_and_bot_edits
[2]
http://stuartgeiger.com/cscw13-labor-hours.pdf
On Sun, May 18, 2014 at 10:08 AM, Scott Hale <computermacgyver(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:
Very helpful, Lukas, I didn't know about the logging table.
In some recent work [1] I found many users that appeared to be bots but
whose edits did not have the bot flag set. My approach was to exclude users
who didn't have a break of more than 6 hours between edits over the entire
month I was studying. I was interested in the users who had multiple edit
sessions in the month and so when with a straight threshold. A way to keep
users with only one editing session would be to exclude users who have no
break longer than X hours in an edit session lasting at least Y hours
(e.g., a user who doesn't break for more than 6 hours in 5-6 days is
probably not human)
Cheers,
Scott
[1] Multilinguals and Wikipedia Editing
http://www.scotthale.net/pubs/?websci2014
--
Scott Hale
Oxford Internet Institute
University of Oxford
http://www.scotthale.net/
scott.hale(a)oii.ox.ac.uk
On Sun, May 18, 2014 at 5:45 PM, Lukas Benedix <lbenedix(a)l3q.de> wrote:
Here is a list of currently flagged bots:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:ListUsers&offset=&am…
Another good point to look for bots is here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3APrefixIndex&prefix…
You should also have a look at this pages to find former bots:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots/Status/inactive_bots_1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots/Status/inactive_bots_2
And last but not least the logging table you can access via tool labs:
SELECT DISTINCT(log_title)
FROM logging
WHERE log_action = 'rights'
AND log_params LIKE '%bot%';
Lukas
Am So 18.05.2014 18:34, schrieb Andrew G. West:
User name policy states that "*bot*"
names are reserved for bots.
Thus, such a regex shouldn't be too hacky, but I cannot comment
whether some non-automated cases might slip through new user patrol. I
do think dumps make the 'users' table available, and I know for sure
one could get a full list via the API.
As a check on this, you could check that when these usernames edit,
whether or not they set the "bot" flag. -AW
_______________________________________________
Wiki-research-l mai
--
Brian C. Keegan, Ph.D.
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Lazer Lab
College of Social Sciences and Humanities, Northeastern University
Fellow, Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences, Harvard University
Affiliate, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School
b.keegan(a)neu.edu
M: 617.803.6971
O: 617.373.7200
Skype: bckeegan
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