2013/1/2 Matthew Flaschen mflaschen@wikimedia.org
He may have misspoke on the "we" part. However, for wikis with bot approval processes (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bot_Approvals_Group ), there is tracking on what bots work on (due to the potentially disruptive nature of an active bot on a large wiki).
Before generalizing it will be very useful to overview various wikis. According to the interwikis, very few wikis have an explicit bot policy like enwiki and even less have BAG. Definition of a bot may vary, too: in the bot policy of enwiki only automatic processes are called bots, while in other projects the so-called "assisted edits" may also qualify as botwork. Enwiki!=Wikipedia.
A bot approval group could certainly encourage people to participate in this dashboard. For the bot writer, all it should take is a HTTP POST to the dashboard every few edits to check in (which could be a simple as "350 edits for task XYZ in the last hour", in appropriate format).
This "all it should take" is not so trivial for everybody, and may require rewriting a plenty of running bots.