On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 4:46 PM, Ilmari Karonen <[email protected]> wrote: > Platonides wrote: >> Gregory Maxwell wrote: >>> >>> It's not reasonable by any human (or legal) standard to continue to >>> misattribute in a case like that, yet addressing that case with some >>> automatically generated report is not easy. >> >> There could be an override for some articles for outsiders, just to stop >> misattribution in the time being, but it can't be treated as a solution. >> If it attricutes a bot, the algorith is wrong and shall be fixed. > > This particular case should be easy to fix, but only because we're > fairly meticulous about flagging bot accounts. Essentially, we'd be > falling back to a human saying "that account is a bot, don't attribute > anything to it". > > Which, I suppose, is a fairly straightforward and objective decision to > make, but it's still a human decision made according to someone's > personal point of view. Certainly such a fix won't easily generalize to > more controversial cases. <snip>
And what is inherently wrong with a attributing a bot? Some Wikis are heavily influenced by bots that import systematic content (like the Rambot articles on small towns). At a legal level users like "ShadowCat" and "ShadowCat's Bot" are both pseudonyms and I doubt it makes any difference whether you attribute one or the other. From a practical point of view, I think distinguishing bot generated content is actually a quite useful detail for downstream users to be aware of (especially if very few editors other than the bot have influenced the text). Depending on where and how the bot got it's content, it might be necessary to add attribution to some external source(s). However, if we are talking about a tool for aiding attribution, and not The Answer to attribution, then I certainly wouldn't drop bots until a human has had a look, and maybe not even then. -Robert Rohde _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
