[OSM-talk] Bot edits on the OSM wiki

[Minh Nguyen]

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

-- 
minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us