Keep in mind that this is totally unreliable; a malicious bot could pretend
to be human, or pretend to be a bot, as it wills.

wikt.3.connelm wrote:

(In reply to comment #1)

Keep in mind that this is totally unreliable; a malicious bot could pretend
to be human, or pretend to be a bot, as it wills.

Exactly. But with no way of discerning which is which, no judgement (with
respect to a wiki's local policies) can be made.

All kinds of spoofing exists - bogus or unrelated edit summaries, "minor" etc.
This one simply will indicate that someone seems to be using the pywikipedia.py
code. Some people will want to pay attention only to bot edits (sometimes)
while other people will want to exclude all of them all of the time. Right now,
only the server "knows" which is which.

ezyang wrote:

Marked enhancement. What you're suggesting is somewhat equivalent to HTTP user
agents.

robchur wrote:

(In reply to comment #0)

Currently, a system of wild guessing is used to determine is someone is a 'bot.

No, it's not - it's quite simple. A local bureaucrat assigns a user "bot"
rights, which suppress that user's edits from showing up in the default recent
changes view; it's an additional filter. This is typically done because someone
would like to perform a large number of edits, semi or fully automated, without
flooding changes pages, but it doesn't have to be.

Detecting apparent bots is dangerous, because if one manages to spoof as such,
and we grant it bot rights, then potentially unpleasant editorial changes will
go unnoticed by the vast majority of users.

wikt.3.connelm wrote:

Rob, that is the *opposite* problem. What you say is true on Wikipedia,
perhaps. But on Wiktionary, it would be really helpful to see which users are
actually using automated tools to create lots of entries quickly (not marked
with the bot flag) so that they can be slowed down or coerced into compliance
with existing formats, before they go too far. That's why my original request
wasn't to filter in any way; merely to _flag_ such edits in Special:RecentChanges.

It is quite the opposite response to suggest that someone pretending their bot
might be given the bot flag. The natural result that I see, is that they'd be
given a short term block, while at the same time a lot more people would
suddenly pay attention to those edits.

anyfile wrote:

The only thing I can think is to show in a special way in recent changes such
eidts (for example in a way similar to the red exclamation mark used for the
markaspatrolleddiff mecchanism.

But the main problem is how to know that an edit is made by a bot?
One way can be using the HTTP user agent string (see #3), but this way you will
able to catch the edit made by compliant bot that agree to use a specific string
in the HTTP user agent identification.

One other way would be to trig a mechanism when too many edits are made on a
limited number of time by one user or one IP (this would not have to be done in
live)