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 <https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Special:Watchlist> has a "hide bots" option toward the top, also accessible from <https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-watchlist>. 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 <https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-personal> 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 _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
