Hi all,

When I wrote the new API client library standard, one of the intended
effects was that libraries would make it easy for bot-runners to
comply with the user-agent policy found at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User-agent_policy . However, different
people understand the policy to mean different things.

As I read it, the relevant parts of the policy are:

"If you run a bot, please send a User-Agent header identifying the bot
and supplying some way of contacting you, e.g.:
`User-Agent: MyCoolTool/1.1 (http://example.com/MyCoolTool/;
MyCoolTool@example.com) BasedOnSuperLib/1.4`"

There's been some discussion in the context of my client library
evaluation project here:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API_talk:Client_code/Evaluations/Java_Wiki_Bot_Framework_%28JWBF%29
and here: https://github.com/jpatokal/mediawiki-gateway/issues/65 . As
I understood it, the example provided demonstrated the requirements,
but it's now clear to me that there's room for ambiguity in the
interpretation of the user-agent policy.

My question is: what information is essential to "identify" a bot? The
example given appears to contain the bot name and version, a link to a
page with more information and/or the repository for the bot's code,
and the framework that was used to write the bot (SuperLib/1.4, I
assume). Does WMF operations want all of these components? What is the
minimum necessary to comply with the policy, and what is bonus
information?

-Frances

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