Very helpful, Lukas, I didn't know about the logging table.

In some recent work [1] I found many users that appeared to be bots but whose edits did not have the bot flag set. My approach was to exclude users who didn't have a break of more than 6 hours between edits over the entire month I was studying. I was interested in the users who had multiple edit sessions in the month and so when with a straight threshold. A way to keep users with only one editing session would be to exclude users who have no break longer than X hours in an edit session lasting at least Y hours (e.g., a user who doesn't break for more than 6 hours in 5-6 days is probably not human)

Cheers,

Scott

[1] Multilinguals and Wikipedia Editing http://www.scotthale.net/pubs/?websci2014

Scott Hale

Oxford Internet Institute

University of Oxford

http://www.scotthale.net/

scott.hale@oii.ox.ac.uk

On Sun, May 18, 2014 at 5:45 PM, Lukas Benedix <lbenedix@l3q.de> wrote:

Here is a list of currently flagged bots:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:ListUsers&offset=&limit=2000&username=&group=bot

Another good point to look for bots is here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3APrefixIndex&prefix=Bots%2FRequests_for_approval&namespace=4

You should also have a look at this pages to find former bots:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots/Status/inactive_bots_1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots/Status/inactive_bots_2

And last but not least the logging table you can access via tool labs:
SELECT DISTINCT(log_title)
FROM logging
WHERE log_action = 'rights'
AND log_params LIKE '%bot%';

Lukas

Am So 18.05.2014 18:34, schrieb Andrew G. West:

> User name policy states that "*bot*" names are reserved for bots.
> Thus, such a regex shouldn't be too hacky, but I cannot comment
> whether some non-automated cases might slip through new user patrol. I
> do think dumps make the 'users' table available, and I know for sure
> one could get a full list via the API.
>
> As a check on this, you could check that when these usernames edit,
> whether or not they set the "bot" flag. -AW
>

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--
Scott Hale
Oxford Internet Institute
University of Oxford
http://www.scotthale.net/
scott.hale@oii.ox.ac.uk