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