Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/COIBot

The following discussion is an archived debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. The result of the discussion was

Speedily Approved.

COIBot

Operator: Beetstra

Automatic or Manually Assisted: Automatic

Programming Language(s): Perl

Function Summary: Calculate overlap between username and a) external links added or b) name of the page edited and report when there is significant overlap (which may mean a conflict of interest of the user).

Edit period(s) (e.g. Continuous, daily, one time run): Continuous

Edit rate requested: 1 edits per minute (????)

Already has a bot flag (Y/N): N

Function Details: The bot reads the page-edit and link addition feeds from irc.wikimedia.org (channel #en.wikipedia) and from freenode (#wikipedia-en-spam and #wikipedia-swmt).

The former gives a feed of all pages that are edited on wikipedia. COIBot extracts from that the username and the pagename that user has edited, and calculates the overlap between these two. When there is significant overlap, it reports that edit.

The latter give a feed of links added to wikipedia pages (wikipedia-en-spam only for this wikipedia; wikipedia-swmt for the small wikis). It extracts the username and the links added, and reports when there is significant overlap between username and the domain.

Specific cases can be blacklisted (e.g. connection between IP and a pagename). Accidental overlaps can be whitelisted (a user may have the same username as the page s/he is editing, without any connection). Specific urls can also be monitored, to see e.g. addition of links by multiple accounts or IPs.

All these reports go to meta.wikimedia.org, see m:User:COIBot/COIReports. In principle this bot can read many wikis, and report them.

From the database reports on specific users and specific links can be generated, which will also be stored on meta (they may be cross-wiki).

For the account here (this request) it will report only the edits on the English wikipedia (this wikipedia). At the current rate of reporting it seems on average a bit less than one hit a minute, but saving of the hits is batchwise. Every 25 hits are reported, which is one edit every 10 minutes (peak time) to 1 hour, but this may increase when more IPs get blacklisted on COIBot. I assume it is optimal if it is about 2-4 reports every hour (otherwise watchlists will be unreadable).

All reporting will be outside mainspace, this bot should not edit anywhere outside the wikipedia namespace. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 22:58, 15 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Position of the logs will be (for now) under Wikipedia:WPSPAM (i.e. pages per day as subpages of Wikipedia:WPSPAM/COIReports). --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 00:01, 16 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

Speedily Approved. - as it does the task already on meta, I see no compelling reason to run trials here. Make sure that the edit rate stays below 2 per minute until a bot flag is granted. Thanks, Mart inp23 00:20, 16 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.