[Wikinews-l] Organizing work on bots

[Brian Anderton]

Make that six ;) I would not mind learning.. 

Oh and congratulations on the stewardship, someone else I can nag now :)

Brian Anderton

-----Original Message-----
From: wikinews-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikinews-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Milos Rancic
Sent: Sunday, 23 December 2007 4:43 p.m.
To: Wikinews mailing list
Subject: Re: [Wikinews-l] Organizing work on bots

Great to see that there are five of us :)

On 12/23/07, Thunderhead <wm-thunderhead at charter.net> wrote:
 > Secondly, I am absolutley willing to learn. Do you know if the
 > Foundation hosts a bot operators mailing list, or any good
 > (and I say "good" because I've spent hours on end looking for
 > a code tutorial website through Google) websites to learn it?

Yes, there is a list [1]. It is with very low activity (last email was 
written at November 2nd), which may be a good condition. So, it would be 
good that all of you join this list and to continue to talk about 
technical issues there. Please confirm here that you joined the list.

(There is also pywikipediabot list and you should join there [2], too. 
But this list is pywikipediabot specific and it is used mainly by their 
developers to discuss pwb development.)

But, we are Wikimedians and we have much better place for collaborative 
work. A couple of weeks ago I opened a course on Wikiversity [3] with 
the idea of collaborative learning.

I wrote there a scratch, with a subpage for people who are using 
Windows. Note that the course is wider then our needs and our path. 
While someone may be completely content with using Windows, we have to 
pass a complete road to active usage of GNU/Linux because our bots have 
to be controlled from Toolserver. (So, for people who are using Windows, 
Cygwin is good enough.)

Basic documentation for Python is its official tutorial [4], which is 
very good for the start. Anyone who has knowledge of some other language 
may learn Python basics in one hour. (Of course, if that person doesn't 
read the book, but primary examples and testing them.)

For using pywikipediabot you will have to know to use subversion 
(actually, two commands: "svn checkout" and "svn update"). Take a look 
at their primary page [5].

On 12/23/07, Nathan Reed <nathanreed at gmail.com> wrote:
 > I too would very much like to learn python... :) If I can use that
 > knowledge to further the goals and aims of the WMF in general and
 > Wikinews in particular, well.... Yeah!

Actually, my plan for Wikiversity course is exactly that: Starting with 
Wikimedia wide project from Wikinews :)

On 12/23/07, the wub <thewub.wiki at googlemail.com> wrote:
 > I've started learning Python and the pywikipedia framework, and have
 > recently written a bot on Wikipedia ([[en:User:The wubbot]]) I am keen
 > to get more involved in Wikinews, and was considering working on a bot
 > to do similar tasks, so would be grateful for any help. I don't know
 > much about GNU/Linux, but I'm certainly willing to learn.

Whenever I am online (and it is very often, but note that I am living in 
GMT+1 time zone), (all of) you may ask me if you have some questions in 
relation to GNU/Linux and bots. At least, I am sure that I am able to 
tell you what documentation to read :)

* * *

Ok. Let's summarize where we are standing:
- Terin, Nathan (?), Thunderhead (?) -- you should ask for an account on 
Toolserver [6][7] if you don't have accounts there. (If I rightly 
understood, Nathan and Thunderhead know to use GNU/Linux.)
- The Wub, start with option 1 or 2 from this [8] page.

Whatever we learn, we should write on Wikiveristy course page. Maybe it 
would be better to keep the main communication on wiki talk pages (with 
feed reader it is easy to follow all of the subpages :) ).

* * *

And about my stewardship... Thanks for congratulations. And it is very 
interesting to see that there is no way to abuse steward rights two 
times. Transparency is at very high level and there are not a lot of 
interesting things on private lists... Actually, as I remember it from 
my checkuser days, emails were very boring.

So, it is funny to offer bribe to one steward :) It may have a sense 
only if stewards become one highly bureaucratic group of Wikimedians. 
Then you would have to bribe a steward to do something which had to be done.

* * *

[1] - http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikibots-l
[2] - http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Programming_bots_on_Wikimedia_projects
[3] - http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Programming_bots_on_Wikimedia_projects
[4] - http://docs.python.org/tut/tut.html
[5] - http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Using_the_python_wikipediabot
[6] - The main page for Toolserver is: 
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Toolserver
[7] - Place for asking user accounts is: 
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Toolserver/New_accounts
[8] - 
http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Programming_bots_on_Wikimedia_projects/Prereq
uirements/Using_MS_Windows


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