Great idea.
There is are also two interesting points which have not been mentioned.
First, having a single bot avoid "interwiki bot wars" on pages. It is
not so uncommon to have several bots editing back and forth on the
same page, simply because they dont share the same settings/run the
same software.
And second, a more personal/controversial remark:
At pywikipedia, and more generally in the bot communities on each
projects, we have regularly young power-users showing up, and trying
out bots, because, well... mostly e-fame I would say, and the
excitement of playing with a new toy.
Depending on the bot policies, those rather Python-unskilled people
can get bot flags on some wikis, and end up running tools they dont
understand and that they dont update. That hurts, in many contexts.
Perhaps you'll remember the WikiDreamer case, which had me running
around all projects. And periodically, we have other troubles, with
users not able to communicate with the projects they run their bot on,
etc, etc...
That would give us a good opportunity to clear those issues, and to
improve bot images in general by having a single entity doing those
changes.
2010/1/10 Kalan <kalan.001(a)gmail.com>om>:
The name should be as simple as possible. We already
have two compound
nouns (inter+wiki, tool+server), and if we try to construct a
meta-compound noun out of them, it starts to horrify everything.
My suggestion: Interbot.
This clear, sense-making and recognizable name is free on all
Wikimedia projects and is now registered to DaB.’s email.
I disagree. Interbot sounds very unclear to me.
But we digress: I dont see why we need to find a user name now.
Also, I dont see why we should use a single SUL account crosswiki.
Think international: it is a nice opportunity to have a bot name that
would be localized for each project. Make sure that any beginner
contributor can understand what the bot has done by giving it a local
name that he can understand.
That would give us very little extra work (just a single page listing
all usernames with a few contribs links for each wiki).
I am also very excited by the technical promises of that proposition.
* I am pretty sure that one process only would not be enough to ensure
a decent-enough refresh rate. It will also require to cycle through
the projects to make sure that all projects are treated.
* Also, the only way the have to "slice" interwiki work is to select a
portion of the source's wiki Special:Allpages that will be treated by
the bot: it might not be good enough if several processes are running
in the same time, because they will end up duplicating work
* Centralizing all work gives us several nice performance/logging opportunities
Regards,
--
Nicolas Dumazet — NicDumZ