Re: [OSM-talk] Bot edits on the OSM wiki

[Andy Townsend]

On 25/02/2019 09:37, Christoph Hormann wrote:
... There are several ethical concerns that motivate me here - the one 
that

is easiest to understand is probably that allowing bots would create a
two class system within the OSM community on the wiki - those who are
able to develop and run bots would form a ruling class while the rest
would be subject to this rule whether they agree with it or not.  And
for this to happen bots would not need to be used on a regular basis,
the mere possibility of this creates the hierarchy between those who
can and those who cannot.


As an aside from the discussion about bots, we already have a 
distinction between "those are are familiar with wikimedia concepts, and 
think that all users should be too" and "those who just want to document 
stuff".  Unfortunately some of those in the former category had to be 
stopped from editing because they were effectively stopping anyone in 
the latter category from doing anything at all, and unfortunately some 
of the effects are still there.  I remember that I gave up on 
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=Derbyshire=history 
back in 2017 when one particular wiki elf insisted I was "doing it wrong".


However a number of areas have been much improved since their departure 
- https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Beginners%27_guide doesn't suffer 
from "categoryitis" that it used to before, for example.  Another 
example of a much improved area is 
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Android - there's still a link to 
the category but an explanation saying what it is!


There are still some example of "don't edit this" pages - 
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Template:Place is one such (but as 
it's a template that's understandable).


Part of the problem we had with "problem users" above was that they 
effectively acted like bots; they didn't think about how other people 
worked with the data (both creators and consumers). This could be a 
problem with bot edits too, but only if the bot creator doesn't think 
about other people.  The tricky bit with wiki edits is summarising the 
status quo while also reflecting the various conflicting points of view 
- any bot that is used to "force" it's authors view on others would be a 
problem.


Best Regards,

Andy


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Re: [OSM-talk] Bot edits on the OSM wiki

[Christoph Hormann]

On Monday 25 February 2019, Frederik Ramm wrote:
>
> But: If you engage in the collaborative writing of a document with
> others, and one of them decides to replace all occurrences of "Open
> Source Software" with "Free and Open Source Software" (for example),
> by using a search-and-replace mechanism in the chosen editing
> platform, would you also object to that?

I would not think very highly of someone who makes such a change on the 
OSM wiki (in a "don't you have anything better to do" kind of way) and 
if someone does this sequentially on a large number of pages i would 
probably ask them to stop.

> And then further, assuming your answer is "well that's ok if the edit
> makes sense", what if Mediawiki had a global search-and-replace
> function, where you click on a button, and fill in a form. Would this
> also make you disengage from the platform altogehter?

For the purpose of collaborative documentation and communication in OSM 
and without any possibility to opt out of the global search-and-replace 
for contributors: Yes.

> From there, it's only a small step to "bot edits", they're basically
> nothing else than a global search-and-replace, it's just the way the
> Mediawiki software is built that people use the "bot API" for things
> like this.

I know.  Mediawiki is not primarily written for use as the basis of the 
OSM wiki so obviously not every function it offers makes sense in that 
context.

> You mention a potential "two class system" but frankly, does this not
> already exist, with one class being those who understand and use
> templates to the full extent of their capabilities, and the other
> class not daring to touch them? [...]

I see templates rather critically because they can - as you said - be 
used for very similar things as bot, by editing a template you can 
mechanically modify all the pages that make use of the template.  And 
widely used templates (in particular for example 
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Template:ValueDescription) have 
been used in this fashion in the past.

Where templates have a useful purpose on the OSM wiki are IMO three 
things

* providing some standardized formatting for things (like tag and key 
templates)
* providing a mechanism and some verification to record structured data 
on the wiki which is otherwise without a firm structure.
* integrating external sources of information in the wiki (like taginfo 
stuff).

The important thing is to keep these clearly separated, limit use of 
templates to these things and not allow sneaking in of mechanisms of 
algorithmic control of human contributions into it.

But the fundamental difference is that templates can only be used to 
manipulate content within a template.  So i can when contributing to 
the wiki opt out of templates by deliberately contributing outside of 
templates only.

> I think it would benefit the wiki if we stopped allowing everyone to
> pursue their personal hobby horses - wit recent motorcycle stuff, or
> wikidata features added, or a lot of verdy_p's work - and request
> that more discussion happens before edits are made.

Yes, in a lot of ways the wiki is currently not serving its purpose very 
well because it is often used to pursue personal interests on their own 
and not for what it is primarily meant for, namely for documenting and 
communicating about mapping in OSM.

But i don't think that bots could in any way help with this problem, on 
the contrary, they create additional means with extended power for 
people to pursue their personal interests and would likely aggrevate 
the problem rather than solving it.


-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/

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Re: [OSM-talk] Bot edits on the OSM wiki

[Frederik Ramm]

Christoph,

you recognize yourself that your position is a bit extreme about this.

Personally, I have an issue with Wikipedia which, at least in some
less-frequently visited corners of the project, often looks more like a
bot playground than a collaborative project by humans. This negative
impression (page last edited by a human a year ago, and after that, 10
edits by bots) also informs my skepticism towards mechanical edits in OSM.

But: If you engage in the collaborative writing of a document with
others, and one of them decides to replace all occurrences of "Open
Source Software" with "Free and Open Source Software" (for example), by
using a search-and-replace mechanism in the chosen editing platform,
would you also object to that?

And then further, assuming your answer is "well that's ok if the edit
makes sense", what if Mediawiki had a global search-and-replace
function, where you click on a button, and fill in a form. Would this
also make you disengage from the platform altogehter?

From there, it's only a small step to "bot edits", they're basically
nothing else than a global search-and-replace, it's just the way the
Mediawiki software is built that people use the "bot API" for things
like this.

You mention a potential "two class system" but frankly, does this not
already exist, with one class being those who understand and use
templates to the full extent of their capabilities, and the other class
not daring to touch them?

I think that "bot edits" should certainly be discussed and controlled,
and not be used to unilaterally introduce features that one person
likes, but many of the same effects of bot edits can even today be
achieved by making changes to templates - you can change the appearence
of 100s of pages with a little templating magic.

I don't really understand how you can be fundamentally opposed to one
and accept the other.

I think it would benefit the wiki if we stopped allowing everyone to
pursue their personal hobby horses - wit recent motorcycle stuff, or
wikidata features added, or a lot of verdy_p's work - and request that
more discussion happens before edits are made.

But I don't think that "bot or not bot" is the big question.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frede...@remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"

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Re: [OSM-talk] Bot edits on the OSM wiki

[Eugene Alvin Villar]

On Monday, February 25, 2019, Christoph Hormann  wrote:
> Now the question if aristocratic governance would be beneficial for the
> OSM wiki compared to the anarchy we currently have more or less is
> something i would be open to discuss.  But basing membership in the
> aristocratic class on the technical ability to develop and run bots is
> quite obviously a bad idea.

Being able to code need not result to a rise in an aristocratic wiki class.
While I know that some people here do not want the OSM community to emulate
some practices in the Wikipedia community, I would argue that Wikipedia's
policy of only allowing wiki bots to run with explicit approval and for
very specific tasks is something we should consider. This gives the power
back to the community to decide when and where wiki bots are allowed to
operate.

We already have this practice on the main OSM database itself with the
Automated Edits code of conduct and the Import Guidelines.
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Re: [OSM-talk] Bot edits on the OSM wiki

[Christoph Hormann]

On Monday 25 February 2019, Jean-Marc Liotier wrote:
>
> If that is an essential concern for you, I have bad news about the
> Openstreetmap database...
>
> Robots are not sovereign entities: they are puppets to humans and
> therefore bound to human rules, to which supplementary restrictions
> are added to compensate for their large-scale effect. Therefore, the
> authors of automation have greater power to realize their vision -
> but they remain under political control... Works pretty fine for our
> map, doesn't it ?

Sigh.

I suppose that it was inevitable that someone would equate the OSM 
database with the OSM wiki in this discussion.

A lot could be said about the differences here but i hope we can 
simplify this to 'apples and peaches' and therefore not a meaningful 
comparison.

Needless to say that a bot edit on the OSM database comparable to the 
one on the wiki that motivated me to start this thread would very 
likely never have found approval from the community.

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/

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Re: [OSM-talk] Bot edits on the OSM wiki

[Jean-Marc Liotier]

On 2/25/19 10:37 AM, Christoph Hormann wrote:

There are several ethical concerns that motivate me here - the one that
is easiest to understand is probably that allowing bots would create a
two class system within the OSM community on the wiki - those who are
able to develop and run bots would form a ruling class while the rest
would be subject to this rule whether they agree with it or not. [..]


If that is an essential concern for you, I have bad news about the 
Openstreetmap database...


Robots are not sovereign entities: they are puppets to humans and 
therefore bound to human rules, to which supplementary restrictions are 
added to compensate for their large-scale effect. Therefore, the authors 
of automation have greater power to realize their vision - but they 
remain under political control... Works pretty fine for our map, doesn't 
it ?



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Re: [OSM-talk] Bot edits on the OSM wiki

[Christoph Hormann]

On Monday 25 February 2019, Tobias Knerr wrote:
>
> For the benefit of people who don't know the background, it's worth
> mentioning that these bot edits did not distort the actual meaning of
> the wiki pages, but were purely performing a trivial technical
> maintenance task.

Yes, the defense of these edits based on their merit was expected.  I am 
completely fine with you or others approving bot edits based on this 
argument.  But i also pointed out already that for me this is not a 
significant argument in this case.  I will simply not engage in 
cooperative writing of documentation and communication if i have to 
accept that bots are free to edit what i wrote - even if that is just 
fixing obvious typos or similar things.

If there is need for a platform for bot curated content in OSM that 
should be separated from where humans engage in cooperative writing and 
communication.

I am also completely at ease if the majority of the OSM community wants 
to embrace bots on the OSM wiki.  It would just not be a platform for 
me any more then.

There are several ethical concerns that motivate me here - the one that 
is easiest to understand is probably that allowing bots would create a 
two class system within the OSM community on the wiki - those who are 
able to develop and run bots would form a ruling class while the rest 
would be subject to this rule whether they agree with it or not.  And 
for this to happen bots would not need to be used on a regular basis, 
the mere possibility of this creates the hierarchy between those who 
can and those who cannot.

Now the question if aristocratic governance would be beneficial for the 
OSM wiki compared to the anarchy we currently have more or less is 
something i would be open to discuss.  But basing membership in the 
aristocratic class on the technical ability to develop and run bots is 
quite obviously a bad idea.

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/

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Re: [OSM-talk] Bot edits on the OSM wiki

[Minh Nguyen]

On 2019-02-24 11:18, Christoph Hormann wrote:


Yesterday was the first time (that i am ware of at least) a bot has
edited an OSM wiki page on my watchlist - with today and yesterday
combined 17 edits of tag and key pages spamming my watchlist feed.


I'm not sure if it's on by default, but 
 has a "hide 
bots" option toward the top, also accessible from 
. 
If you enable the option, the bots can't bother you unless you look at 
an individual page's edit history.


If you prefer to receive your watchlist notifications by e-mail, you can 
go to 
 
and uncheck "Email me also for minor edits of pages and files" (which is 
unchecked by default). The bot edits in question were all marked as 
minor edits, since they had little or no effect on the rendered wiki 
pages. It's probably a good idea to uncheck this option anyways; I'm 
sure I'm not the only human editor guilty of spotting my numerous typos 
only after posting a comment. :-)



I know that to some this likely seems a fairly radical attitude - the
popularity of platforms like facebook and twitter where algorithms
interfere with human communication extensively is testimony to the fact
that a lot of people don't have the same concern.  I am aware of this
but my position none the less remains as described.


Far from the opaque algorithms found on social media sites, this bot is 
merely performing a regular expression-based find-and-replace, much as 
one would do in JOSM. There would have to be a very good reason for a 
more sophisticated bot to run on the OSM wiki. Hopefully the wiki never 
becomes the target of such vandalism and spam that the likes of 
Wikipedia's ClueBot would be required.


But maybe a bot that replaces American English with British English? 
April Fool's isn't that far away. :-P



Possible solutions to the problem would IMO be:

[...]
* create a bot free fork of the OSM wiki and maintain the original OSM
wiki as a zone where bots are allowed.


So far it looks like most of this bot's edits have been confined to the 
data items namespace, which makes sense -- bot edits are far less 
error-prone in that namespace than when dealing with MediaWiki syntax. 
At some point, the infoboxes in the Tag: and Key: namespaces will be 
able to get all their structured data from the data items, which will 
largely eliminate the need for this bot to touch the tag description pages.


On a historical note, TTTBot [1] used to be quite active in the main 
namespace. Its job was to keep certain tables synchronized with the 
infoboxes on software description pages. The bot went dead at some 
point, so the wiki wound up with increasingly outdated information about 
things like version numbers and prices. [2][3] The system was always 
quite fragile, and MediaWiki's template syntax is intimidating even to 
programmers, so I'm glad we're moving structured data to data items 
instead of relying on carefully handcrafted template calls.


[1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:TTTBot
[2] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Android_applications
[3] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Comparison_of_iOS_applications

--
m...@nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us


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Re: [OSM-talk] Bot edits on the OSM wiki

[Yuri Astrakhan]

Tobias, thank you for clarification.  The lang parameter was very often
incorrect because people copy/pasted it without changing.  I did a minor
clean up with a manual inspection of every edit - similar to many of my
previous edits (by "yurik" account), but with the bot+minor flag to avoid
exactly the problem that Christoph outlined - to reduce spam in the
watchlist and recentchanges.  Note that the only way you would get a
notification is if you have "Email me also for minor edits of pages and
files" checked on your user preferences page (disabled by default).

The goal of the project [1] is to organize key and tag documentation - make
it available to other systems in a machine readable format, allow JOSM and
iD to get that data directly, and allow users to contribute key/tag/rel
descriptions without the need to create wiki pages (or to even know what
wiki markup is or how to create a template with parameters).  Lastly, this
project will highlight accidental (but numerous) mismatches between
languages -- wiki pages in different languages very often show different
mismatched information in the sidebox (e.g. if it is ok to use on a
node/way/rel, or status). Some cases are warranted, but the vast majority
are simply stale translations.  Eventually the hope is to remove all
parameters from the wiki pages, and just have a  {{TagDescription}} without
any parameters to show an infobox.  It will also allow wiki to avoid tables
of values with duplicated information.

[1]  https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Data_items
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Re: [OSM-talk] Bot edits on the OSM wiki

[Andy Mabbett]

On Sun, 24 Feb 2019 at 19:18, Christoph Hormann  wrote:

> a bot has edited an OSM wiki page on my watchlist

Diff(s), please.

> spamming my watchlist feed

Its possible to exclude bot edits from watchlists; note the checkbox
at the top of your watchlist; and the "advanced options" sections of
the "watchlist" tab in your prefenrnces.

> Should bots continue to make edits on the OSM wiki

Depending on the type of edit; yes.

> that would for me
> mean the end of it as a platform of cooperation and communication.  To
> me bots messing with the content of communication on a platform like
> this makes it fundamentally unsuitable as a means for communication
> between human beings in a community project like OSM.

I know of several wikis that would cease to function without bots; not
least for the removal of spam and abusive postings, but also for
performing maintenance tasks in bulk,

> Note this has nothing to do with the merits of the edits themselves.

That should be the only consideration

--
Andy Mabbett
@pigsonthewing
http://pigsonthewing.org.uk

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Re: [OSM-talk] Bot edits on the OSM wiki

[Tobias Knerr]

On 24.02.19 20:18, Christoph Hormann wrote:
> I mainly wanted to make everyone who is not active on the wiki aware of 
> this.

For the benefit of people who don't know the background, it's worth
mentioning that these bot edits did not distort the actual meaning of
the wiki pages, but were purely performing a trivial technical
maintenance task.

Here's an example:
https://wiki.osm.org/w/index.php?title=Tag:waterway%3Driverbank=1805725=1650789==2015

To explain what's going on: The infoboxes on tag documentation pages are
available in different languages. In the past, users editing the wiki
had to manually set the desired language for the infobox with parameters
such as "lang=en". That's no longer necessary because the infobox now
automatically recognizes that it's part of an English page, and that it
should probably display "Description" rather than "Descripción" or
"Beschreibung".

So as there is no longer a point in having "lang=en" parameters, they
were recently removed by a bot. These edits are marked as bot edits,
which not only makes it transparent that the edit was performed by a
bot, but also solves the practical issue of watchlist spam (because such
edits can be easily filtered out from the watchlist).

Note that this wasn't some AI making decisions on its own, either, but
simply a human editor deciding to remove a particular line of text from
more than one wiki page at the same time. The bot API is just a tool
that makes this process less tedious.

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[OSM-talk] Bot edits on the OSM wiki

[Christoph Hormann]

Yesterday was the first time (that i am ware of at least) a bot has 
edited an OSM wiki page on my watchlist - with today and yesterday 
combined 17 edits of tag and key pages spamming my watchlist feed.

I mainly wanted to make everyone who is not active on the wiki aware of 
this.

Should bots continue to make edits on the OSM wiki that would for me 
mean the end of it as a platform of cooperation and communication.  To 
me bots messing with the content of communication on a platform like 
this makes it fundamentally unsuitable as a means for communication 
between human beings in a community project like OSM.

Note this has nothing to do with the merits of the edits themselves.  It 
is a fundamental ethical question for me.  Even for a bot that passes a 
Turing test with flying colors my position would remain the same.

I know that to some this likely seems a fairly radical attitude - the 
popularity of platforms like facebook and twitter where algorithms 
interfere with human communication extensively is testimony to the fact 
that a lot of people don't have the same concern.  I am aware of this 
but my position none the less remains as described.

Possible solutions to the problem would IMO be:

* banning bots from the OSM wiki.  That would be the cleanest and most 
sensible solution IMO.
* allowing human wiki users to opt out of interacting with bots (meaning 
that bots would be disallowed from editing pages that have been 
previously edited by users that have opted out).
* create a bot free fork of the OSM wiki and maintain the original OSM 
wiki as a zone where bots are allowed.
* create some other new platform of communication and cooperative 
documentation writing as alternative to the wiki where bots are banned.

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/

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