Definitely worth discussing. For ENWP, I suggest bringing this up on VP:T. Thanks, Pine On Feb 11, 2015 12:45 AM, "Petr Bena" <benapetr(a)gmail.com> wrote: _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

It's relevant for all projects and languages. I haven't done it in a while, but I had my periods of massive AWB editing, and other RC patrollers rightly complained about it and asked me to do such things with a bot account. <thinkingoutloud>The question is, how would it be different from the usual bot accounts. Last time I checked, AWB worked through a browser control and not through API (though again, it was a while ago). And which users will have a permission to use it? Some "trusted" users? Autoconfirmed? AWB has its own permissions system based on wiki pages, so maybe this could be discarded of a new "tool edit" permission.</thinkingoutloud> -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com ‪“We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬ 2015-02-11 11:10 GMT+02:00 Pine W &lt;wiki.pine(a)gmail.com&gt;om>: _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

As I said, I belive that any registered user should be able to use, with no need for permissions as I see no way to abuse it.

On 11 Feb 2015 17:57, "Petr Bena" &lt;benapetr(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: If anyone can use it, wouldn't the smarter vandals just use it to avoid the RC patrollers?

How does a user prove that they're using a particular tool a way that can't be faked? Something like OAuth comes to mind. All edits made via an OAuth consumer are already tagged with a unique tag, and I would assume that it is not possible to falsely represent an OAuth consumer.

I'm not sure whether this could work for common tools like AWB or Twinkle, though: * I don't know whether OAuth works for client-side downloadable programs like AWB. * JavaScript tools edit as the user from the user's browser, and as such, OAuth is not relevant to them. In any case, anything they do (like adding a specific string to edit summaries, adding a tag to their edits, or the like) can be easily spoofed or faked by a tech-savvy user.

Il 11/02/2015 14:07, This, that and the other ha scritto: AFAIK the OAuth extension cannot work for them by design, see https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/OAuth/For_Developers#Intended_Users. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

Please excuse the combined replies. On Wed, Feb 11, 2015 at 4:10 AM, Pine W &lt;wiki.pine(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Probably better to host the discussion on Meta, since it affects all wikis. Then you could advertise it on enwiki and other major wikis. On Wed, Feb 11, 2015 at 4:57 AM, Petr Bena &lt;benapetr(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Well, there's marking edits as "tool" invalidly to the point where people can't filter these "tool" edits without missing vandalism. I note you're conflating the 'bot' right (which is what allows for marking an edit as 'bot', and generally forces it for web UI edits) with the 'bot' group that includes several other rights. On Wed, Feb 11, 2015 at 5:19 AM, Tim Landscheidt &lt;tim(a)tim-landscheidt.de&gt; wrote: TTO is working on that, with me as the main reviewer. https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/188543/ -- Brad Jorsch (Anomie) Software Engineer Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

On 11 February 2015 at 09:33, Petr Bena &lt;benapetr(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: No, absolutely not. MediaWiki is entirely independent.

Hi Petr, Petr Bena schreef op 11-2-2015 om 7:50: Don't break your head over this. 1. We build this tool edit feature (or not). The ability to use it is a userright (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ListGroupRights) 2. We have each wiki figure out if they want to add this right to an existing group ("autoconfirmed users"?) or to create a new one I think this would be a very nice feature. Wikidata recentchanges ( https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:RecentChanges) is currently completely unusable because of automatic edits. Maarten _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

Hoi, What does this have to do with English Wikipedia ? It is useful everywhere.. Why limit the scope ? Thanks, GerardM On 11 February 2015 at 10:33, Petr Bena &lt;benapetr(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

On 15-02-12 01:13 AM, Pine W wrote: In the time-honored spirit of bikeshedding, I'd suggest that the right name for this is "automated edit" rather than "tool edit". -- Marc _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

What would be the letter for it then? s? t? a? On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 8:31 PM, Pine W &lt;wiki.pine(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

Hoi, S or T .... what language ?? What do you propose for Cyrillic ? Thanks, GerardM On 13 February 2015 at 18:22, Pine W &lt;wiki.pine(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: I right _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

Vandals would have fun with that, but bot group could be set up like that (e.g. "flood" group) Semantics of flags are up to wiki communities. They can make it mean whatever they desire. So like the bot flag (if they have the rights) :p matking rdits Sounds kind of like the little known bot rollback feature minus the rollback aspect. -- This sounds either like you are proposing the bot flag, with a minor varation in the user given semantics. Or are proposing multiple levels of bot flaggedness so that tool edits could be independently hidden in rc separate from "tool" edits. --bawolff _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

What if a techie vandal builds a one-click disruption framework? Il 15/02/2015 10:54, Petr Bena ha scritto: I think it's pretty clear what I am proposing here :P there is a real _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

2015-02-11 14:02 GMT+01:00 Ricordisamoa &lt;ricordisamoa(a)openmailbox.org&gt;rg>: Definitely this is the point. In enwiki's environment the word "bot" is usually meant as a fully automated tool, while other communities treat it differently. Let's see a major utility of Pywikibot, replace.py. This is equally prepared for automatic and semiautomatic mode, and some tasks may be solved automatically, while others -- above all spelling corrections -- manually. This still means a very high speed rate of editing but it is human-controlled. If I use it in manual mode, it is a tool, and when I see it working well, and at a given point I choose "a" (replace all) instead of "y" (yes, replace actual occurance), it suddenly becomes a bot? I think these tool-assisted edits like AWB are essentially bot edits with human contribution: high speed, huge amount of edits in a short time that may be misused before anybody notices. Either they flood recent changes or if they are hidden, they are very hard to notice in case of a mistake and even harder to undo. Therefore the right of using AWB is equal to the right of using PWB and should require a highly trusted user in my opinion. That does not mean I am against a new group (which still means that every community may use or not use it); that means I don't see any important difference between "bot" and "tool" account. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

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 &lt;benapetr(a)gmail.com&gt;om>: 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?

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

It is complex and bureaucratic on the English Wikipedia, i.e., less than 1/890 of the projects.

intervention usually decreases the chance of mistakes.

I randomly opened RecentChanges page on enwiki and this is what I saw: http://img.ctrlv.in/img/15/03/06/54f9d5645eb03.png from 50 edits, at least 8 were automated, just as much interesting as any regular bot edit. It usually is even worse, anyway as you can see about 20% of all edits you can see now in recent changes are automated "bot-like" edits made by humans. When I enable "show bots" from 50 edits I see 1 edit made by a bot. From simple observing of recent changes you will see that bots are producing far less edits than users with automated tools. Still bots are problem that needs to be filtered out, while these users are not? This was originally my point. I don't really care if we just extend bot flag for regular users as well, or if we create a new flag, but we should do something about this. It would definitely make life of many users easiers, especially those who actively review the contributions of others. On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 5:13 PM, Brad Jorsch (Anomie) &lt;bjorsch(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: > <Note this reply is written with my enwiki community member hat on, and in > no way represents anything official> > > On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 5:19 AM, Ricordisamoa &lt;ricordisamoa(a)openmailbox.org&gt; > wrote: > >> It is complex and bureaucratic on the English Wikipedia, i.e., less than >> 1/890 of the projects. >> > > I note that enwiki's process for receiving the bot flag and rules around > bot editing are "complex and bureaucratic" in large part because what one > person thinks is an obvious fix that no one could object to (e.g. > "==Section==" versus "== Section ==") turns out result in a huge outcry > when a bot is doing it all over the place. > > The idea is that the review process (which is basically just having one of > a list of experienced bot operators look over the proposal for problems, > then review some sample edits) will hopefully catch problems before they > become a big deal, and the rules make it easier to stop for (hopefully) > calm discussion rather than arguing while perceived disruption continues. > > Instead, I think bots are easily tricked by edge cases, whereas human >> intervention usually decreases the chance of mistakes. >> > > On the other hand, a tool may be more aggressive with proposing changes > that would be fooled by edge cases while relying on the human to fix it > before submitting. Even if the tool is not being more aggressive, the human > is vulnerable to missing an error through inattention or through > misunderstanding their responsibility and blindly clicking "approve". > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l