From: Milos Rancic <millosh(a)gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Proposals for the first global roles
To: andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk, "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"
<foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Date: Friday, May 30, 2008, 6:59 AM
On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 1:40 PM, Andrew Gray
<shimgray(a)gmail.com> wrote:
2008/5/30 Mohamed Magdy
<mohamed.m.k(a)gmail.com>om>:
>> Besides that, most interwiki bots
>> will run on all languages of one project
rather than various projects,
>> so interwiki bots for other projects
would
normally not come to
>> wiktionary to edit there.
>
> Exactly, you would ask for a global flag on
wikipedia or wiktionary or any
> other project... not a global flag for every
project created..
My understanding is that the tool we have is
"global everywhere"; we
don't have the capacity to say "global
on all
Wikipedias", etc.,
without doing it manually, which is... well, what
we
had before.
Yes, but a person who is running bot from, let's say,
German
Wikipedia, will never reach any Wiktionary. And if a bot
owner is
enough trusting to have a bot privilege on Wikipedias, it
is really
paranoid to expect that such person will abuse their
privileges by
writing case-insensitive links/pages on Wiktionaries; even
this is not
default at pywikipediabot, as Andre said.
No one expects bot owners to intentionally do harm. But people would not be aware of
these issues unless some bot owner had once thought it a good idea to run the Wikipedia
script on another project.
Maybe one solution is to put a cap on these flags for now. If we only have a dozen bots
to worry about; it will be easier to watch for them and for all the owners to be informed
of these issues. But if there are an unlimited amount of flags given out and they become
some sort of trophy for bot owners at some point the information is going to be lost.
Birgitte SB