On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 4:46 PM, Ilmari Karonen <nospam(a)vyznev.net> wrote:
Platonides wrote:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
It's not reasonable by any human (or legal) standard to continue to
misattribute in a case like that, yet addressing that case with some
automatically generated report is not easy.
There could be an override for some articles for outsiders, just to stop
misattribution in the time being, but it can't be treated as a solution.
If it attricutes a bot, the algorith is wrong and shall be fixed.
This particular case should be easy to fix, but only because we're
fairly meticulous about flagging bot accounts. Essentially, we'd be
falling back to a human saying "that account is a bot, don't attribute
anything to it".
Which, I suppose, is a fairly straightforward and objective decision to
make, but it's still a human decision made according to someone's
personal point of view. Certainly such a fix won't easily generalize to
more controversial cases.
<snip>
And what is inherently wrong with a attributing a bot? Some Wikis are
heavily influenced by bots that import systematic content (like the
Rambot articles on small towns).
At a legal level users like "ShadowCat" and "ShadowCat's Bot" are
both
pseudonyms and I doubt it makes any difference whether you attribute
one or the other. From a practical point of view, I think
distinguishing bot generated content is actually a quite useful detail
for downstream users to be aware of (especially if very few editors
other than the bot have influenced the text).
Depending on where and how the bot got it's content, it might be
necessary to add attribution to some external source(s). However, if
we are talking about a tool for aiding attribution, and not The Answer
to attribution, then I certainly wouldn't drop bots until a human has
had a look, and maybe not even then.
-Robert Rohde