Note these are my own thoughts and not anything representative of the team.
On Wed, Nov 13, 2013 at 6:55 AM, Strainu <strainu10(a)gmail.com> wrote:
b. If the robots should _not_ be credited, how do we
detect them?
Ideally, there should be an automatical way to do so, but according to
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bots, it only works for recent changes.
Less ideally, only users with "bot" at the end should be removed, in
order to keep users like
https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilizator:Vitalie_Ciubotaru (which is
not a robot, but has "bot" in the name) in the contributor list.
Another way to exclude (most) bots would be to skip any user with the
"bot" user right. Note though that this would still include edits by
unflagged bots, or by bots that have since been decommissioned and the
bot flag removed.
Personally, though, I do agree that excluding any user with "bot" in
the name (or even with a name ending in "bot") is a bad idea even if
just applied to enwiki, and worse when applied to other wikis that may
have different naming conventions.
. The idea is to decide if and how to credit:
a. vandals
b. reverters
c. contributors which had their valid contributions rephrased or
replaced from the article.
d. contributors with valid contributions but invalid names
The hard part there is detecting these, particularly case (c). And
even then, the article may still be based on the original work in a
copyright sense even if no single word of the original edit remains.
Then there's also the situation where A makes an edit that is
partially useful and partially bad, B reverts, then C comes along and
incorporates parts of C's edit.
--
Brad Jorsch (Anomie)
Software Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation