I don't dispute that CategorizationBot is enormously useful and has
accomplished great things for Commons. I'm just saying that the user
talkpage notices are a nag and are annoying. Combined with all the other
bot and userscript notices, it creates an environment that is better
described as "aggressive" and "bitey" than "friendly" or
"welcoming".
And I don't imagine that I'm the only person who has this opinion.
Unfortunately, most of these notices are necessary by policy, but
categorization notices aren't. So I think it would be better for
CategorizationBot's user talkpage notices to be opt-in rather than
opt-out. I'm sorry if I came across as being dismissive of your work.
That certainly wasn't my intention. Your work is extremely important to
Commons. I just didn't say that because I thought it was obvious :)
Ryan Kaldari
On 2/28/11 1:53 PM, Maarten Dammers wrote:
Hi Ryan,
Op 22-2-2011 21:06, Ryan Kaldari schreef:
Speaking of friendliness on Commons, does
CategorizationBot really need
to post notices on both the File pages and User Talk pages? Maarten?
Yes. People tend not the notice things left on file pages. This way they
do notice.
This seems overly aggressive to me.
Aggressive? What's aggressive? The fact that a user is kindly invited
to
help out or the message itself?
A user is asked to help out because we're always low on people helping out.
The message is at
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Please_link_images . If you
don't like it, be bold and make it a better message.
My categorization project started somewhere in 2008. I was tired on
stumbling upon uncategorized files. A lot of great photo's, but
impossible to find. So first I wrote something to find all uncategorized
files and tag them. Next step was to try to find categories for these
images. At some point I started notifying people to try to get them
involved. I don't know if it helped, what I do know is that the number
of uncategorized files is pretty stable around (100K) and that my bot
helped categorize over 200K files (probably even more). The full
statistics are at
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Multichill/Categorization_stats
The exact workings of the bot and frequently asked questions about the
bot are at
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:CategorizationBot . I
try to update this page based on the questions I get. Might be worth
reading.
I don't consider it very friendly to dismiss my work as aggresive ;-)
Maarten
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