On 4 February 2014 15:54, Risker
<risker.wp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Risker,
out of interest, considering my long track record of useful
bot-work on Commons, would you support my proposal to let Faebot do
some sensible non-controversial work on en.wp or do you think I am a
danger to Wikimedia?
I'd defer to the opinion of the Bot Approval Group, Fae. Bots have done
(and
continue to do) extremely useful work on English Wikipedia. They've
also been involved with some difficult-to-fix harm (usually
unintentional,
by poor programming or without understanding of
underlying content
issues),
and unfortunately there has been a pattern of a
handful of bot owners not
cleaning up those sorts of problems. This has resulted in the bar being
raised for everyone.
The issue of bot article creation is one that will vary widely from
project
to project depending on the culture and
philosophy of the community. If
we
think a bit, we're all likely to come up with
a project or two that
expanded rapidly with the use of bots, only to find that the content
added
had to be removed because it didn't meet
copyright requirements or was of
very poor quality. On the other hand, we've also seen brilliant
successes.
And yes, there was some fairly significant early
expansion of English
Wikipedia through bot article creation. Some of those articles have
barely
been touched since - except by other bots.
Risker
I take that as a no.
That's unfortunate, Fae. It's meant to say "I don't have the knowledge
to
analyse whether or not your bot works, so I would defer to those who do." I
don't think I'm qualified to figure out whether or not your bots, or anyone
else's bots, should be operating on Wikipedia.
I'd have the same answer to a developer who wanted me to review code, or an
engineer who wanted me to look at his designs for an internal combustion
engine. It's just knowledge outside of my scope.
Risker