The rockstar of my community is a bot: Where are the humans?
summary
A platform called Remote Lab aggregates APIs into a unified dataset and an identities DB, with a tool named Sorting Hat to merge profiles, tag bots and record organization affiliations over time. A 10‑year Wikimedia analysis shows the top committers are automated accounts and that a large share of commits come from bots, so raw contributor counts are misleading. Current process is manual; planned ML classifiers face class imbalance, evolving behavior and “cyborg” accounts.
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chapters (9)
- 0:00Introduction and context
- 2:14Introducing RemoteLab
- 6:27Identifying bot contributors
- 9:09Identity mapping challenges
- 11:42Sorting Hat solution
- 13:28Human vs bot contributions
- 15:15Future of bot detection
- 22:22Conclusion and resources
- 23:26Q&A session
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