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_edi... 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@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. _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l