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/ _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
