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Filters for edits by Citation bot, InternetArchiveBot and OAbot from diffs and the Watchlist
Closed, DeclinedPublicFeature

Description

Feature summary (what you would like to be able to do and where):
These three bots and tools (there may be some additional ones) can clutter the Watchlist and reduce time-efficiency of editors. I understand that it's useful to also have these bots' edits checked but usually they are fine and enabling this feature doesn't mean that everybody makes use of it.

On the Watchlist there would be an easy to find option like "Filter common enhancive bots" (further info is shown when hovering on it) in the Watchlist Filters (or elsewhere in the Watchlist panel). When checked this would filter items from the Watchlist that were only by edited by these bots since one last visited the page. Moreover, and this is the main component of this proposal, it would also filter these bots' changes from the diffs when there have been edits to the page by not just, but including, any of these bots.

These bots are very useful and when their changes are filtered out from a diff there could be a note at the top such as "1 edit by Citation bot is hidden, visit the revision history to check its change". The diff url could have a parameter such as ?filtereb=1 set but that isn't required. This is very different from filtering out "minor" edits, filtering out all bot edits and filtering items from the Watchlist in general (it's more about the diffs).

Use case(s) (list the steps that you performed to discover that problem, and describe the actual underlying problem which you want to solve. Do not describe only a solution):
If one has many articles on the Watchlist and wants to check all of them or as many as possible, this takes a lot of time. It also takes more effort to see the semantic changes done by human editors when diffs are very long and cluttered with such bot changes. This filter could save a lot of valuable editors' time which they can use for other things.

Benefits (why should this be implemented?):
It would reduce the time and effort needed to scan through diffs because fewer items show on the Watchlist and diffs are not cluttered by cosmetic and enhancive changes to citation parameters and so on.

Event Timeline

Restricted Application added subscribers: Cyberpower678, Aklapper. · View Herald Transcript

Filtering for "Automated contributions" (either "Bot" or "Human (not bot)" is already possible on Special:Watchlist. There are no plans to support and maintain an additional per-single-wiki and/or per-single-user list of editors to not show.

Filtering for "Automated contributions" (either "Bot" or "Human (not bot)" is already possible on Special:Watchlist.

Yes, but that's not what this issue is about at all:

This is very different from filtering out "minor" edits, filtering out all bot edits and filtering items from the Watchlist in general (it's more about the diffs).

Again: this is mainly about the diffs and about these three specific bots.


There are no plans to support and maintain an additional per-single-wiki and/or per-single-user list of editors to not show.

Maybe I should propose this elsewhere and maybe it could or should be implemented via a gadget or so. I don't think adding support for such functionality can turn out to be problematic. Instead, the usefulness of this would be tremendous and it could save a lot of editors' time. Lastly, it's not an arbitrary "list of per-single-user editors" but a hard-coded filter for these three bots in specific.

Instead of closing this despite these clarifications anyway, I suggest adding a tag like "WMF won't implement" (if that is the case) or "Low Priority".

That's what "declined" is supposed to mean with regard to MediaWiki-Watchlist . :)