+1 (and my apologies if my reply was somewhat sharp too). I have
worked with the Analytics team pretty extensively and they are
excellent people. As another consumer of this data, I only tend to
disagree with them about prioritisation - and even when I think
they're /wrong/ I've never seen a situation where they didn't have a
really good reason for disagreeing with me ;p. A bit of AGF goes a
really long way.

On 22 December 2015 at 10:46, Toby Negrin <[email protected]> wrote:
> Thanks for the information Oliver.
>
> Hi John -- I just wanted to point out in a friendly way that your original
> email would have been just as effective if you had omitted the last line
> about a waste of effort to build. We always like to get feedback and
> questions from the community but the analytics team works hard to make good
> decisions and use donor money wisely. I'd love to see more constructive
> language on these lists.
>
> Warmly,
>
> -Toby
>
> On Tue, Dec 22, 2015 at 12:30 AM, Oliver Keyes <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> On 21 December 2015 at 21:00, John Mark Vandenberg <[email protected]>
>> wrote:
>> > On Tue, Dec 22, 2015 at 12:23 PM, Madhumitha Viswanathan
>> > <[email protected]> wrote:
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> On Mon, Dec 21, 2015 at 5:15 PM, John Mark Vandenberg
>> >> <[email protected]>
>> >> wrote:
>> >>>
>> >>> On Tue, Dec 15, 2015 at 10:51 AM, Madhumitha Viswanathan
>> >>> <[email protected]> wrote:
>> >>> > +1 Oliver - User agents tagged with WikimediaBot are tagged as bot -
>> >>> > I
>> >>> > do
>> >>> > agree that our documentation on this can be approved, I'll update
>> >>> > the
>> >>> > Webrequest and Pageview tables docs to reflect this.
>> >>>
>> >>> Where was this announced?
>> >>> I don't believe pywikibot does this, or was notified that it should do
>> >>> this...?
>> >>>
>> >> Apologies, it wasn't. Here is a task for it -
>> >> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T108599, and it's in our pipeline to
>> >> get
>> >> done.
>> >>
>> >>>
>> >>> Are accounts with the bot flag also tagged as bot?
>> >>>
>> >>
>> >> I believe bot flags associated with accounts are not part of the
>> >> webrequest
>> >> data, so we don't look at it.
>> >
>> > There is a bot request parameter associated with many write actions,
>> > and there is assert=bot available for all API requests since 1.23 (and
>> > earlier with Extension:AssertEdit)
>> > See https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Assert .
>> >
>> > Why cant those be used?  They are validated data.
>> >
>>
>> Because many "bot" requests go nowhere near the API, because almost no
>> "pageviews" go near the API, because Assert is designed exclusively
>> for logged-in API requests, which most API requests are not, because
>> Assert is designed (primarily) for edits, which no pageviews are.
>>
>> > user-agent with 'WikimediaBot' is not validated data; anyone can
>> > change the user-agent and it magically becomes a bot?  That sounds
>> > like a way to ensure this data is not reliable and a waste of effort
>> > to build.
>> >
>>
>> Anyone can change the user-agent and it magically becomes considered
>> automated software, yes. This is absolutely no different from the
>> moment, where anyone can change their user agent to say, the GoogleBot
>> user agent and also becomes considered automated software. The vast
>> vast vast majority of actual human users never do this, and those that
>> do tend not to be interested in distorting our automata statistics but
>> instead not providing a consistent user agent for privacy purposes, in
>> which case they use browser extensions to roll between an array of
>> actual human UAs. There's no real incentive to roll between automata
>> UAs because some sites restrict the features you can or can't access
>> (for example: not providing JavaScript) if they think you're a
>> crawler. As of yesterday, I have been handling the raw webrequest logs
>> for 2 solid years and in that time the number of obviously-human
>> "automata" I've seen has been minuscule.
>>
>> > --
>> > John Vandenberg
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > Analytics mailing list
>> > [email protected]
>> > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Oliver Keyes
>> Count Logula
>> Wikimedia Foundation
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Analytics mailing list
>> [email protected]
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> [email protected]
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>



-- 
Oliver Keyes
Count Logula
Wikimedia Foundation

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