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_edi... https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=allusers&augrou... https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=categorymembers&... 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@gesis.org
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