Clarification: Excluding bots, in this ticket, means excluding edits that have the bot flag on them.

In T217097#4999916, @Mooeypoo wrote:

Clarification: Excluding bots, in this ticket, means excluding edits that have the bot flag on them.

The concept of "bot edits" is only for recentchanges, right? https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Recentchanges_table#rc_bot

Isn't there a flag on the user?

In T217097#5002600, @Mooeypoo wrote:

Isn't there a flag on the user?

Yes (or a former flag). I thought you were talking about edits marked as bot edits, which is a more exacting way to do it, but of course we'd have to use recent changes which won't work in all cases. I think joining on user_groups / user_former_groups will probably be slow... but certainly worth a try :)

Note that some communities such as Spanish Wikipedia will sometimes hand out the bot flag to human accounts for high-rate editing, yet not all their edits are necessarily "bot" edits. Edge case for sure, just pointing out that there probably isn't a foolproof solution. Also there may be drive-by edits by patrollers, AWB users, etc., that are not really part of the event, per-se. I doubt it will skew the metrics too much. We'll find out!

In T217097#5002876, @MusikAnimal wrote:

In T217097#5002600, @Mooeypoo wrote:

Isn't there a flag on the user?

Yes (or a former flag). I thought you were talking about edits marked as bot edits, which is a more exacting way to do it, but of course we'd have to use recent changes which won't work in all cases. I think joining on user_groups / user_former_groups will probably be slow... but certainly worth a try :)

So, @Mooeypoo, what is the upshot here? Do we still have a relatively easy way to filter out bots? Or does the removal of that flag make this unfeasible, given our time constraints?