[WikiEN-l] Servers down?

[James R.]

I'm sure some of the keen programmers around would like to see the bot code 
for any such sysop-based bot that might hit BRFA just to look for any open 
errors or programming holes in the code. But for the unfortunate bots, we 
always have access to the tools we need to remove it.

Another idea is have a Wikipage that has the bot controls in it, and have it 
full protected so that admins can start and stop the bot whenever a problem 
occurs. e.g. BotName looks at [[User:BotName/controls]] and sees that the 
param in the edit box is "botstatus=on;" and then continues its duties at 
the sandbox. If it sees "botstatus=off;" it kills the process altogether and 
waits a certain period before trying again.

I've seen it around, just cannot remember where I found it ;)

- E

--------------------------------------------------
From: "Nathan" <nawrich at gmail.com>
Sent: Saturday, January 19, 2008 12:25 AM
To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Servers down?

> Are closed source bots prevalent? Isn't part of the BRFA process
> evaluation of the underlying code? Any admin bot should probably be
> relatively slow, and make up for the slowness with long periods of
> uptime. Some of the paranoia is a bit farfetched - it shouldn't be
> incredibly difficult to get well designed bots that don't screw up,
> and notice when they do. It might be exceptional among bots, but it
> should still be possible. Bot RfA's have been doomed from the outset
> recently, because most of the !voters don't have the technical skills
> to evaluate whether or not its well designed (myself included).
>
> On Jan 18, 2008 6:28 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 18/01/2008, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > On 18/01/2008, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>> >
>> > > What's wrong with giving bots sysop access? Are you worried they 
>> > > might
>> > > rise up and overthrow the human sysops?
>> >
>> >
>> > More or less. There's lots of paranoia on en:wp about admin bots going
>> > batshit in sorcerer's apprentice mode. Though I don't think it's
>> > warranted, as *anything* an admin can do is easily reversible except
>> > history merges. (Making those *easily* reversible is one for the
>> > wishlist.)
>>
>> But that's not true when bots are involved. A human can only screw up
>> at roughly the same speed as another human can fix it, so it's not a
>> big deal, but a bot can screw up a million times in a few minutes -
>> that's not practically reversible without using another bot to undo it
>> all, which takes a lot of preparation (the bot needs to be written,
>> tested to make sure it's not going to screw things up even more, and
>> approved - that's likely to take a day or so at least).
>>
>> Personally, I wouldn't object to open source admin bots ("With enough
>> eyes, all bugs are shallow." or whatever the quote it), but closed
>> source ones are too likely to go wrong and are thus too risky (the
>> chance of them going wrong is still quite small, but the potential
>> damage is enormous, so the risk is still high). Also, an open source
>> bot can probably be modified by any programmer to fix its own mistakes
>> quite easily, doing that with a closed source bot requires the author.
>> (So a closed source, supervised bot wouldn't be so bad, but I'd still
>> rather not have them.)
>>
>>
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