Kunal sent me this note off-list explaining the observed drop in unique bot activity:

I'm not on the analytics list, but I saw your email about bot activity dropping in Feb 2013 on enwiki (http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/analytics/2014-January/001515.html), and the reason is that all interwiki bots were shutoff due to the deployment of Wikidata.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bot_owners%27_noticeboard/Archive_8#Wikidata is the relevant thread with some info.

Dario

On Jan 16, 2014, at 8:18 PM, Dario Taraborelli <dtaraborelli@wikimedia.org> wrote:

yes, I’m just pulling some year-long data on bot activity and wanted to exclude something trivial (like some Wikidata bot activity in early 2013 that may have suddenly ceased in February?)

On Jan 16, 2014, at 8:15 PM, Steven Walling <swalling@wikimedia.org> wrote:



On Thursday, January 16, 2014, Dario Taraborelli <dtaraborelli@wikimedia.org> wrote:
I noticed that the number of daily unique registered bots with at least 1 ns0 edit on enwiki saw a steep drop in February 2013. Does anybody have a clue about the cause, before I dig further into this data?

https://docs.google.com/a/wikimedia.org/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ams-fyukCIlMdHZPbGlaMXdkbjdYZ0RKWnUxWTBXUVE#gid=0

Thanks,
Dario

Do we have usernames/ids for those bots that stopped? 
 
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