Well, it's interesting what differences are among
projects concerning what
is considered a bot or a bot edit and how hard is to get a bot flag.
Anyhow, flexibility is always welcome as far as it is really flexible, that
means the projects may use or not use it.
2015-02-23 15:03 GMT+01:00 Petr Bena <benapetr(a)gmail.com>om>:
IMHO I don't think we need to be make a
distinction between bots and
people. Bots should have "bot" in their username which makes it simple
to see if edit was made by robot or human and in both cases the edits
are automated.
Much better MediaWiki should be at last set up to store the botflag (as
well as a
newly introduced tool flag, if it goes through) in page histories
so that users and bots and tools can figure out whom an edit belongs to.
This is a many-year saga, and I am pretty sure this is the programmer way
of solving this problem, not some confusing naming convention, which could
probably prohibit some humans to freely choose a user name (is the guy with
an IRL surname Abbot a bot?) and will surely mess up things in projects
with non-Latin alphabet.
I see two more points to discuss, but this may be the scope of the
communities.
1. A bot account may easily be blocked for technical reasons (too high edit
rate etc.) or misuse, way easier than a human. A bot does not need to
explicitely go against rules/guidelines to be blocked, it's enough for an
admin to have problems to discuss while he/she cannot reach the owner. What
about a human tool owner? When they commit edits at a high rate that can be
quiestionnable or need community discuss, should we block them (which
applies to non-tool-flag edits, too) or leave them go and make harm?
2. Where editcounters have relevance, will the tool edits be considered
equally to a manual edit?
There should definitely be a way of excluding
'tool'/bot edits from the
total. I often find Wikidatans' edit counts nullified by Widar.
But this may really be out of the scope of Wikitechm
just for thinking.
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l