I want to remove bot users from my research since they inject a lot of
noise on the data and do not represent human collaboration or community
actual status. The aim of the model would be to detect actual (or
mostly-behaving-as) bot users but not flagged as *'bot'* in the mediawiki
*bot* group; just to get rid them off from my analysis in this way, and it
would not meant to be used to label users within the mediawiki communities.
I came up with this question since I was studying the wiki:
https://cocktails.wikia.com and I found that, one of the most prolific
users is "IngredientSortBot" which, besides its name, has a history of
edits very characteristic for a bot user:
https://cocktails.wikia.com/wiki/Special:Contributions/IngredientSortBot;
but it's not included in any bot group and, because of that, it was
included in my analysis and thus, biasing it.
El sáb., 19 ene. 2019 a las 20:42, WereSpielChequers (<
werespielchequers(a)gmail.com>) escribió:
Aside from the sensitivities of this, and yes if there
wasn't any doubt
calling an editor a bot is not something one should do lightly, it isn't an
easy thing to either define or identify. Doing bot edits from a non bot
account is a big deal on Wikipedia, I have seen an admin desysopped and
then blocked for this. Please be aware that labelling goodfaith non bot
editors as bots is unethical and liable to cause another clash between the
community and researchers..
Edits per minute might at first glance look like a safe way to go, but then
you realise that some people will spend a long time manually building up to
a situation where they click a button and that completes dozens of edits
almost simultaneously.
Type of edit and similarity of a series of edits might look like a good way
to go, but what you will have difficulty identifying is that the person who
seems to be making a series of edits without individual consideration may
be working their way through a list of possible edits and clicking save or
skip on each of them as a manual decision. Judging the results from the
edits saved without knowing what led up to saving those edits won't tell
you if an edit was a bot edit.
What you can do is look for dormant accounts that are no longer flagged as
bots. On the English language Wikipedia we have a list of them at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_Wikipedians_by_number_of_ed…
other language versions may have similar lists and are likely to have the
same process of removing bot flags from bot accounts that retire.
Regards
Jonathan
On Sat, 19 Jan 2019 at 10:24, ABEL SERRANO JUSTE <abeserra(a)ucm.es> wrote:
Hello fellow wiki investigators!
I have observed that, very often in wikis, users not in the bot groups
are
actually behaving like bots. Since the mediawiki
api doesn't restrict
normal users to automatize tasks through its API, you might have a
"normal"
user, actually doing bot things. I would like to
identify those and
consider them as bots.
Is anyone aware if there's any implemented model already to classify
whether an user is a bot or not?
Thanks and nice weekend!
--
Saludos,
Abel.
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Saludos,
Abel.