I want to remove bot users from my research since they inject a lot of
noise on the data and do not represent human collaboration or community
actual status. The aim of the model would be to detect actual (or
mostly-behaving-as) bot users but not flagged as *'bot'* in the mediawiki
*bot* group; just to get rid them off from my analysis in this way, and it
would not meant to be used to label users within the mediawiki communities.

I came up with this question since I was studying the wiki:
https://cocktails.wikia.com and I found that, one of the most prolific
users is "IngredientSortBot" which, besides its name, has a history of
edits very characteristic for a bot user:
https://cocktails.wikia.com/wiki/Special:Contributions/IngredientSortBot;
but it's not included in any bot group and, because of that, it was
included in my analysis and thus, biasing it.

El sáb., 19 ene. 2019 a las 20:42, WereSpielChequers (<
[email protected]>) escribió:

> Aside from the sensitivities of this, and yes if there wasn't any doubt
> calling an editor a bot is not something one should do lightly, it isn't an
> easy thing to either define or identify. Doing bot edits from a non bot
> account is a big deal on Wikipedia, I have seen an admin desysopped and
> then blocked for this. Please be aware that labelling goodfaith non bot
> editors as bots is unethical and liable to cause another clash between the
> community and researchers..
>
> Edits per minute might at first glance look like a safe way to go, but then
> you realise that some people will spend a long time manually building up to
> a situation where they click a button and that completes dozens of edits
> almost simultaneously.
>
> Type of edit and similarity of a series of edits might look like a good way
> to go, but what you will have difficulty identifying is that the person who
> seems to be making a series of edits without individual consideration may
> be working their way through a list of possible edits and clicking save or
> skip on each of them as a manual decision. Judging the results from the
> edits saved without knowing what led up to saving those edits won't tell
> you if an edit was a bot edit.
>
> What you can do is look for dormant accounts that are no longer flagged as
> bots. On the English language Wikipedia we have a list of them at
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_Wikipedians_by_number_of_edits/Unflagged_bots
> other language versions may have similar lists and are likely to have the
> same process of removing bot flags from bot accounts that retire.
>
> Regards
>
> Jonathan
>
> On Sat, 19 Jan 2019 at 10:24, ABEL SERRANO JUSTE <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > Hello fellow wiki investigators!
> >
> > I have observed that, very often in wikis, users not in the bot groups
> are
> > actually behaving like bots. Since the mediawiki api doesn't restrict
> > normal users to automatize tasks through its API, you might have a
> "normal"
> > user, actually doing bot things. I would like to identify those and
> > consider them as bots.
> >
> > Is anyone aware if there's any implemented model already to classify
> > whether an user is a bot or not?
> >
> > Thanks and nice weekend!
> >
> > --
> > Saludos,
> > Abel.
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wiki-research-l mailing list
> > [email protected]
> > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> Wiki-research-l mailing list
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>
-- 
Saludos,
Abel.
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