Hello all,

I was asked by various Wikimedia-projects about details of the new no- interwiki-bots rule; I will try to clarify some parts of it in this mail.

For first: The default interpretation of the rule is: no interwiki-bots. The rule forbids the running of any interwiki-bot on the toolserver, if there is no exception that permits the running.

The most important exception is the MMP interwikibot, which is lead by Toto Azéro at the moment. The MMP is allowed to run several instances of interwiki-bots and should cover every wikimedia-project in a fair manner. Until rules are work out there will be no addings of other users to the MMP (it would be great if the TS-users would work out the rules).

Another exception is the creation of a better interwiki-bot and the test- running of it; an example is the new bot by Merlissimo. The test has to happen in a MMP. Of course running the newest pythonwikibot for "testing" is NOT subject of this exception (as long as it not the pywikipedia-MMP).

The last exception is the non-continuous-mode: That's NOT "Only 1 time per week/day/hour". Let's give a example what is covered by this exception: You are working in the Italian Wikipedia and notice that an interwiki-link in an article points to the wrong article in the English Wikipedia. You correct the interwiki-link, but there a dozen of articles in other languages where the link is still wrong – much boring work for a human. Here is it ok to run a interwiki-bot on the toolserver to fix this fast. Another example would be the correcting of hundreds of articles because a Wikipedia-subproject re-organized the name-structure of a article-group. What I had in mind as I declared this exception is, that the number of articles the bot will correct is finite and the run-time of the bot is somehow short.

What is not an exception: *Running a bot in screen instead by cron or SGE *Running a bot only "some time when my home-computer sleeps" *Running a bot because "my Wikipedia is special"

There may be other valid exception or reasons to run a interwiki-bot; if you plan to do this: open a JIRA-ticket and the roots will look at it (every TS- user can leave a comment for course).

If there a further questions please ask on the ML or in the IRC.

Sincerely, DaB.

P.S: You an substitute "interwiki" with "interlanguage" in this mail.