Hi all ,
two questions, maybe someone can help:
1. I was trying to compile a complete list of all bots that were ever (potentially) active
on the English Wikipedia so that one can identify bot accounts in the dumps. Below are all
the lists (including historic bots) that I could find [1]. Out of those overlapping lists,
I extracted 2795 unique bot names (some seem to be just names for bot approval request
pages). Going through the historic edit data (no current redirects), 1377 user names were
actually in that list. Does anyone know if that should cover (almost) all ever active
bots, or is there even a better list/method? I would like to avoid using unreliable
regular expressions. (Similar question for other language editions)
2. I counted bot edits per half year in en.wikipedia and saw a major decrease between in
the first half of 2013 from ~ 3 M to ~1M edits per half year between January and July
2013, which seems to be in line with official stats [2]. This is likely not news, so can
someone enlighten me regarding what brought about that sharp decline of bot edits?
Cheers,
Fabian
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_bots_by_number_of_edits
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots/Status/inactive_bots_1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots/Status/inactive_bots_2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_Wikipedians_by_number_of_ed…
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=allusers&augro…
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=categorymembers&am…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approval/Approved (+ contents of
all archive pages)
https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm#bots
[2]
https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm#editor_activity_levels
—
Dr. Fabian Flöck
Researcher
Computational Social Science department
GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences
Unter Sachsenhausen 6-8, 50667 Cologne, Germany
Tel: + 49 (0) 221-47694-208
fabian.floeck(a)gesis.org
www.gesis.org
www.facebook.com/gesis.org