Last modified: 2011-03-13 18:06:44 UTC
It would be useful to have bot edits marked in history as well as minor edits are now.
See also bug 8129 with similar request for watchlist.
Unlike the watchlist, it's very hard to have it in the history: the history uses the table "revision" (which does not mark bot edits), while the recent changes and watchlist use the table "recentchanges" (which does mark them).
I see. Is there any chance to add marking of bot edits into revision table then to simplify this task or is it too expensive change? I think that history marking bot edits would be useful because of two major reasons: not every bot has a name containing the "(B|b)ot" string or vice versa contains "(B|b)ot" while not a bot. And second: not every edit of bots contains eg. "Robot:..." or "Robot assisted..." etc. in summary. I think that it wouldn't be such a big harm to start this feature without having to synchronize the entire history (which I guess would be the most expensive part of setting of this feature). So everybody will know that bot edits before Day D haven't been marked and since then they are. If I remember correctly, this approach has been already used in some other features.
Just remember that altering the structure of the revision table will hit big wikis hard. For instance, there are about* 95 million rows in this table for the English Wikipedia alone, so it's certainly not something to be done lightly. [*Estimate based on Special:Statistics, not definitive, blah blah]
Realistically, the bot flag is only advisory, and serves to avoid flooding recent changes. It doesn't ever affect what goes into page histories, and I don't think it should be preserved past recent changes.
