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.
Cheers,
Scott