Great idea.
There is are also two interesting points which have not been mentioned.
First, having a single bot avoid "interwiki bot wars" on pages. It is not so uncommon to have several bots editing back and forth on the same page, simply because they dont share the same settings/run the same software.
And second, a more personal/controversial remark: At pywikipedia, and more generally in the bot communities on each projects, we have regularly young power-users showing up, and trying out bots, because, well... mostly e-fame I would say, and the excitement of playing with a new toy. Depending on the bot policies, those rather Python-unskilled people can get bot flags on some wikis, and end up running tools they dont understand and that they dont update. That hurts, in many contexts. Perhaps you'll remember the WikiDreamer case, which had me running around all projects. And periodically, we have other troubles, with users not able to communicate with the projects they run their bot on, etc, etc...
That would give us a good opportunity to clear those issues, and to improve bot images in general by having a single entity doing those changes.
2010/1/10 Kalan kalan.001@gmail.com:
The name should be as simple as possible. We already have two compound nouns (inter+wiki, tool+server), and if we try to construct a meta-compound noun out of them, it starts to horrify everything.
My suggestion: Interbot.
This clear, sense-making and recognizable name is free on all Wikimedia projects and is now registered to DaB.’s email.
I disagree. Interbot sounds very unclear to me. But we digress: I dont see why we need to find a user name now.
Also, I dont see why we should use a single SUL account crosswiki. Think international: it is a nice opportunity to have a bot name that would be localized for each project. Make sure that any beginner contributor can understand what the bot has done by giving it a local name that he can understand.
That would give us very little extra work (just a single page listing all usernames with a few contribs links for each wiki).
I am also very excited by the technical promises of that proposition. * I am pretty sure that one process only would not be enough to ensure a decent-enough refresh rate. It will also require to cycle through the projects to make sure that all projects are treated. * Also, the only way the have to "slice" interwiki work is to select a portion of the source's wiki Special:Allpages that will be treated by the bot: it might not be good enough if several processes are running in the same time, because they will end up duplicating work * Centralizing all work gives us several nice performance/logging opportunities
Regards,