On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 7:09 PM, Dan Garry <dgarry(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
1. When editing via the API, allows the user to
choose whether or not to
flag an edit as a bot edit using the bot parameter.
2. When editing via the standard editing interface, flags all edits
(i.e. all human made edits) as bot edits.
Note for #2, it's possible to submit the edit with a "bot=0" parameter to
avoid the edit being marked as "bot". This also works for logged actions
(which someday need to be fixed in the API to be able to be non-flagged,
much as was done for edits in r29540).
I've always thought the reasons for this disparate behavior are primarily
historical: Way back, there was no editing API and the bot userright forced
edits from the account to be marked as bot edits. But people discovered, as
mentioned elsewhere in this thread, that some edits by accounts that should
have the bot flag shouldn't be hidden from Watchlists and RecentChanges; on
enwiki at least, this led to some bot accounts not being flagged as such.
And eventually things were changed so that the flagging of the edit was
optional rather than a requirement. For index.php edits this had to be done
in a "specify that you don't want this edit flagged" manner to avoid
breaking all the existing code. But for the new editing API it could be
done more directly, so it was.
As for the lack of a UI for "bot=0" in index.php edits, I expect it's both
because others don't want to clutter the UI either and because the editing
API now exists for actual bots.
1. What's the user story for including the edit-level granularity for
bot accounts in the API?
"bot" flagging of edits essentially controls whether the edits are hidden
by default in Watchlists and RecentChanges. Many bots make a mixture of
edits that should be hidden and edits that should not be.
2. What's the user story for making it so that every edit made by a
human on a bot account is flagged as bot edit?
I don't know of one, besides historical reasons as mentioned above. I don't
know about the policies on other wikis, but on enwiki a human editing with
a bot-flagged account is explicitly doing so to have those edits hidden
from RecentChanges and is supposed to use a "regular" account for their
normal editing.
--
Brad Jorsch (Anomie)
Software Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation