To clarify the types of unwelcome bots that we have, here are the ones that I think are most common:
1) Spambots
2) Vandalbots
3) 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