2010/1/7 DaB. <WP(a)daniel.baur4.info>fo>: I think it is an “obvious idea”—with which I mean “great idea”. I would _love_ to see something like that; or, at the very least, something going in that direction (i.e. reduction of the number of bots). The multiplication of interwiki bots is a complete waste of everyone’s time and space, IMHO. -- [[cs:User:Mormegil | Petr Kadlec]]

Hi Victor, Victor Vasiliev schreef: I don't that rule applies to bots. Take for example CommonsDelinker. It is run from a multi-maintainer account and runs at about every Wikimedia wiki. Maarten

On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 4:22 PM, Petr Kadlec <petr.kadlec(a)gmail.com> wrote: Optimally, they should not exist at all and interwiki linking handled by MW itself. Until this happens, the idea of one multi-maintainer bot doing *ALL* IW linking would be great. Marco -- VMSoft GbR Nabburger Str. 15 81737 München Geschäftsführer: Marco Schuster, Volker Hemmert http://vmsoft-gbr.de

Hello all, ok after I got no "stupid idea!"-responses from yours, I will create a Multimaintainer-project for the start. The problem: How should I name it? Interwikibot? Have we still interwiki-bots that dont't use the python- framework? Should I better name it python-interwikibot or a complete other name? Suggestions? Sincerly, DaB. -- wp-blog.de

On 01/09/2010 02:57 PM, DaB. wrote: what about putting TS in it's name to point out it runs from the toolserver? hanks, N.

DaB. wrote: The project name should be the same as the bot, since both should be one.

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(a)gmail.com>om>: 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, -- Nicolas Dumazet — NicDumZ

Hello, At Wednesday 13 January 2010 21:26:13 DaB. wrote: that's the decision of the wikimedia-projects. We can't decide for them. We can only decide, that there will be only 1 interwiki-bot on the toolserver in future - interwiki-bots outside the TS is not our business. Sincerly, DaB. -- wp-blog.de

On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 9:53 PM, Daniel Kinzler <daniel(a)brightbyte.de> wrote: Ok, then I'll just shut up... Still, there's the matter of what it means to 'cooperate to run one'. Would that mean that there's only a single interwiki bot process running? That can only work if it is fast enough to go through _all_ pages on _all_ languages in a reasonable time. And even then you have only replaced the autonomous bots. Running with hints would be hard to get in; interactively running the bot would not be possible at all under such a scheme. Or does it just mean using a single username? In that case I don't see the advantage. Or is it that you want to be sure to use a single codebase? Keeping bots up-to-date is a good idea, but the problem it solves is not a very big one, in my opinion. I think better results could be reached by putting the emphasis on the "cooperating" part rather than the "running one" part. Get some database or such where the bots notify when they have either updated a page or found that it did not need updating, then have the bots (except when running with hints or such) request this database before doing interwiki on a page and skip it if its last notification was less than so-and-so-much time ago (for example one week). -- André Engels, andreengels(a)gmail.com

2010/1/14 Platonides <platonides(a)gmail.com>om>: Obviously. Starting languages also have to be different to cover all sources. I would say that > 80% of TS interwiki bots, if not 100%, are running using -autonomous, as it seems that those are "launch and forget" instances. If bot owners want to run bots interactively, I dont really see how the toolserver is needed: they can just do this on their own machine. I think that the idea of the Toolserver is to have a server which is always up to be able to schedule regular processes without having to worry about your collegue shutting down your apparently inactive local box while you're away. Again, most Toolserver instances should be non-interactive instances. I would not have any problem against users that have, for a specific reason, the need to run an _interactive_ interwiki bot instance from the Toolserver. -- Nicolas Dumazet — NicDumZ

This remark is spot on. I'm an admin on dewikinews and we had all this trouble in the past. One bot operator even had the boldness to tell us he can't fix his misbehaving bot because he just uses pywikipedia and don't know how to modify it. Of course i can't speak for dewikinews in whole, but i believe that the existence of a central iw-bot would be enough reason to disallow all other iw-bots and this would really change things to the better. To be frank, i'm soooo sick of all this iw-bot madness. Regards, Michael -- It's an insane world, but i'm proud to be a part of it. -- Bill Hicks

On Sat, Jan 16, 2010 at 5:42 PM, Michael Holzt < wikimedia-toolserver(a)michael.holzt.de&gt; wrote: On dewiki, once there was an epic battle between 3 or 4 IW bots on one article... turned out to be different configurations, AFAIR. But actually, I don't see why resources should be *wasted* on interwiki bots. All the time and money already invested woulda be better invested in some central "data wiki" or similar so there 'd be absolutely no need for any IW bots. Marco -- VMSoft GbR Nabburger Str. 15 81737 München Geschäftsführer: Marco Schuster, Volker Hemmert http://vmsoft-gbr.de

On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 10:23 AM, Daniel Kinzler &lt;daniel(a)brightbyte.de&gt; wrote: And where am I to found the bot ops? Who are they? What is meant by "bot ops" in fact? (yes, I do realize that it is short for "bot operators", but is there any meaning beyond the literal "someone who operates some bot on some wikimedia project"?) -- André Engels, andreengels(a)gmail.com

Hello again, after this discussion seems to be finish for first, I created [1] to push and coordinate the process from now. Sincerly, DaB. [1] https://jira.toolserver.org/browse/TS-494 -- wp-blog.de