I think a lot of them use the API, but I don't know off the top of my head if it's all of them. If only we knew somebody who has spent the last 3 months staring into the cthulian nightmare of our request logs and could look this up...

More seriously; drop me a note off-list so that I can try to work out precisely what you need me to find out, and I'll write a quick-and-dirty parser of our sampled logs to drag the answer kicking and screaming into the light.

(sorry, it's annual review season. That always gets me blithe.)

On 19 May 2014 13:03, Scott Hale <computermacgyver@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks all for the comments on my paper, and even more thanks to everyone sharing these super helpful ideas on filtering bots: this is why I love the Wikipedia research committee.

I think Oliver is definitely right that 

 this would be a useful topic for some piece of method-comparing research, if anyone is looking for paper ideas.

"Citation goldmine" as one friend called it, I think.

This won't address edit logs to date, but do  we know if most bots and automated tools use the API to make edits? If so, would it be feasibility to add a flag to each edit as to whether it came through the API or not. This won't stop determined users, but might be a nice way to identify cyborg edits from those made manually by the same user for many of the standard tools going forward. 

The closest thing I found in the bug tracker is [1], but it doesn't address the issue of 'what is a bot' which this thread has clearly shown is quite complex. An API-edit vs. non-API edit might be a way forward unless there are automated tools/bots that don't use the API.

1. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11181

Cheers,

Scott

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Oliver Keyes
Research Analyst
Wikimedia Foundation