We've been working on unflagged bot detection on my team. It's far from a real product integration, but we have shown that it works in practice. We tested this in Wikidata, but I don't see a good reason why a similar strategy wouldn't work for English Wikipedia.
Hall, A., Terveen, L., & Halfaker, A. (2018). Bot Detection in Wikidata Using Behavioral and Other Informal Cues. *Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction*, *2*(CSCW), 64. pdf https://dl.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=3274333&type=pdf
In theory, we could get this into ORES if there was strong demand. As Pine points out, we'd need to delay some other projects. For reference, the next thing on the backlog that I'm looking at is setting article quality prediction for Swedish Wikipedia.
-Aaron
On Mon, Feb 11, 2019 at 11:19 AM Jonathan Morgan jmorgan@wikimedia.org wrote:
This may be naive, but... isn't the wishlist filling this need? And if not through a consensus-driven method like the wishlist, how should a WMF team prioritize which power user tools it needs to focus on?
Or is just a matter of "Yes, wishlist, but more of it"?
- Jonathan
On Mon, Feb 11, 2019 at 2:34 AM bawolff bawolff+wn@gmail.com wrote:
Sure its certainly a front we can do better on.
I don't think Kasada is a product that's appropriate at this time.
Ignoring
the ideological aspect of it being non-free software, there's a lot of
easy
things we could and should try first.
However, I'd caution against viewing this as purely a technical problem. Wikimedia is not like other websites - we have allowable bots. For many commercial websites, the only good bot is a dead bot. Wikimedia has many good bots. On enwiki usually they have to be approved, I don't think
that's
true on all wikis. We also consider it perfectly ok to do limited testing of bots before it is approved. We also encourage the creation of alternative "clients", which from a server perspective looks like a bot. Unlike other websites where anything non-human is evil, here we need to ensure our blocking corresponds to social norms of the community. This
may
sound not that hard, but I think it complicates botblocking more than is obvious at first glance.
Second, this sort of thing is something that tends to far through the cracks at WMF. AFAIK the last time there was a team responsible for admin tools & anti-abuse was 2013 ( https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Admin_tools_development). I believe (correct me if I'm wrong) that anti-harrasment team is all about human harassment and not anti-abuse in this sense. Security is adjacent to this problem,
but
traditionally has not considered this problem in scope. Even core tools like checkuser have been largely ignored by the foundation for many many years.
I guess this is a long winded way of saying - I think there should be a team responsible for this sort of stuff at WMF, but there isn't one. I think there's a lot of rather easy things we can try (Off the top of my head: Better captchas. More adaptive rate limits that adjust based on how evilish you look, etc), but they definitely require close involvement
with
the community to ensure that we do the actual right thing.
-- Brian (p.s. Consider this a volunteer hat email)
On Sun, Feb 10, 2019 at 6:06 AM Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
To clarify the types of unwelcome bots that we have, here are the ones
that
I think are most common:
Spambots
Vandalbots
Unauthorized bots which may be intended to act in good faith but
which
may cause problems that could probably have been identified during
standard
testing in Wikimedia communities which have a relatively well developed
bot
approval process. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approval.)
Maybe unwelcome bots are not a priority for WMF at the moment, in which case I could add this subject into a backlog. I am sorry if I sound
grumpy
at WMF regarding this subject; this is a problem but I know that there
are
millions of problems and I don't expect a different project to be
dropped
in order to address this one.
While it is a rough analogy, I think that this movie clip helps to illustrate a problem of bad bots. Although the clip is amusing, I am
not
amused by unwelcome bots causing problems on ENWP or anywhere else in
the
Wikiverse. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lokKpSrNqDA
Thanks,
Pine ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
On Sat, Feb 9, 2019, 1:40 PM Pine W <wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
OK. Yesterday I was looking with a few other ENWP people at what I
think
was a series of edits by either a vandal bot or an inadequately
designed
and unapproved good faith bot. I read that it made approximately 500
edits
before someone who knew enough about ENWP saw what was happening and
did
something about it. I don't know how many problematic bots we have,
in
addition to vandal bots, but I am confident that they drain a
nontrivial
amount of time from stewards, admins, and patrollers.
I don't know how much of a priority WMF places on detecting and
stopping
unwelcome bots, but I think that the question of how to decrease the numbers and effectiveness of unwelcome bots would be a good topic for
WMF
to research.
Pine ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
On Sat, Feb 9, 2019 at 9:24 PM Gergo Tisza gtisza@wikimedia.org
wrote:
On Fri, Feb 8, 2019 at 6:20 PM Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
I don't know how practical it would be to implement an approach
like
this
in the Wikiverse, and whether licensing proprietary technology
would
be
required.
They are talking about Polyform [1], a reverse proxy that filters
traffic
with a combination of browser fingerprinting, behavior analysis and
proof
of work. Proof of work is not really useful unless you have huge levels of
bot
traffic from a single bot operator (also it means locking out users
with
no Javascript); browser and behavior analysis very likely cannot be outsourced to a third party for privacy reasons. Maybe we could do it ourselves (although it would still bring up interesting questions
privacy-wise)
but
it would be a huge undertaking.
[1] https://www.kasada.io/product/ _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
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