Hello all, since the begin of 2011 the number of new interwiki-bots is slow down because of a change in the approval-policy. So step 1 of the improvment of the interwiki-bots-situation is done. The next step (I call it "step 2") I would like to discuss with you is the following: *Creation of a multi-maintaincer-project (MMP), *Creation of a database for this MMP, *Adding of all new interwiki-bots after 1. February, *Adding of all old interwiki-bots until 1. May. The idea behind this is that all interwiki-bots have a common database to access at the end. That should help to avoid a common problem with interwiki- bots: They don't know about each other. I quite often find discussions about the following problem in the wiki- projects: "I read the article de:foo 2 weeks ago and found that it has a interwiki-link to en:foo in it – but this was wrong so I corrected it to en:bar. Last week I found that a bot deleted en:bar and put en:foo back – and that is still wrong and I corrected it back. I also contacted the bot-owner. Today I found that ANOTHER bot removed en:bar AGAIN and put en:foo back – and it is STILL wrong!! I don't like to speak with every bot-owner and corrected 200 wikimedia- projects!" If all interwiki-bots would have a common database, this problem would vanish very soon I guess (at least for the toolserver-interwiki-bots, but non- toolserver-interwiki-bots are not our business and the wikimedia-project should handle that problem). Just having a table with "wrong" interwiki-links. What step 2 is NOT: -All interwiki-bots will run from the MMP, -There is only 1 interwiki-bot for everything. Every bot will still run from the account (ts-account AND wikimedia-project- account) of its owner and in his/her responsibility. But the owner (and the bot) will have access to the common-database of the MMP, which he/she can use to improve his/her bot. I'm sure that the pywikipedia-bot-developer (and the other bot-framework- developer) will support this sooner or later too. I would like to read feedback about step 2 from you (if there is no feedback, I will proceed ;-) ) Sincerly, DaB. -- Userpage: [[:w:de:User:DaB.]] — PGP: 2B255885