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Citation bots reducing the utility of the watchlist

Posted: Thu Mar 16, 2023 5:16 pm
by REEkipidia
If anyone hasn't pointed it out by now, citation bot activity has been increasing since November of 2022, by Biblical proportions.

Now, almost every new edit on your watchlist is from a citation bot, every single day.

This makes the watchlist functionally far less useful as you now have to manually inspect every article's page history to see what edits came before the citation bot, and of course many of those edits are often garbage edits from known trolls/vandals.

It's almost as if one person's convenience (bots) is another's inconvenience. But then again the entire website is run like a third world electrical grid, where the wires are running in 30 different directions from one street corner. Fuck you, I got mine. :jerkoff:

Re: Citation bots reducing the utility of the watchlist

Posted: Thu Mar 16, 2023 7:30 pm
by Bbb23sucks
You mean this? I don't know why bots appear on the watchlist, but it seems like a design flaw to me.

Re: Citation bots reducing the utility of the watchlist

Posted: Thu Mar 16, 2023 8:10 pm
by badmachine
the watchlist allows you to filter out bot edits
botfilter.png
botfilter.png (40.76 KiB) Viewed 1157 times

Re: Citation bots reducing the utility of the watchlist

Posted: Thu Mar 16, 2023 8:53 pm
by Bbb23sucks
badmachine wrote:
Thu Mar 16, 2023 8:10 pm
the watchlist allows you to filter out bot edits

botfilter.png
Is it by default like RC is?

Re: Citation bots reducing the utility of the watchlist

Posted: Fri Mar 17, 2023 11:27 am
by badmachine
Bbb23sucks wrote:
Thu Mar 16, 2023 8:53 pm
badmachine wrote:
Thu Mar 16, 2023 8:10 pm
the watchlist allows you to filter out bot edits

botfilter.png
Is it by default like RC is?
no, it's a setting

Re: Citation bots reducing the utility of the watchlist

Posted: Fri Mar 17, 2023 11:14 pm
by ericbarbour
Bbb23sucks wrote:
Thu Mar 16, 2023 7:30 pm
You mean this?
Citation Bot was one of the first and oldest bots, from 2008. Dozens of similar bots have been written and run on en-WP since. (Notice that it is only used on English and simple English WPs and nowhere else. Virtually all bots are written by English-speakers for one language. Other language WPs don't have this charming little problem.)

I have no doubt that someone has written a new bot that was just started up, and it is now clogging up contribs and Recent Changes. Because most (?) of them are run "client side" on someone's PC, we will never know how many there are, or who runs them.

"Officially registered" bots are here. Notice how many there are for citations. Thousands more are not registered.

Every year the WMF runs a "Community Wishlist" where any "good editor" can request MediaWiki changes, bot creation/changes, and the like. As you can see in the 2022 list, every year hundreds of requests are made. And the vast majority are ignored. Look at the "community vote" for a random item; you can tell which ones are from insiders and "good wikipedians", because those are the ones at the top of the list. Below a certain threshold and you can be reasonably sure the request will be ignored. Note that requests for non-English WPs are routinely ignored.

Re: Citation bots reducing the utility of the watchlist

Posted: Fri Mar 31, 2023 8:57 pm
by Bbb23sucks
Lol. It turns out that this is yet another bug that has not been fixed for decades. Sent to Phabricator in 2007, tagged (or as Wikidiots want you to call it, "triaged") as "high" priority.. and still not fixed.