Hello all,
As you may know, over the past months we’ve been struggling with more and
more bots editing Wikidata at a very high rate, causing infrastructure
issues having an impact on the Query Service that couldn’t keep up with the
changes and on tools such as Pywikibot
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T242081>.
Over the years, we tried different things (like Add Wikidata query service
lag to Wikidata maxlag <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T221774>, increase
maxlag or factor <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T243701#5864130>, limit
the edit rate for all accounts <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T184948>).
Wikidata admins also approached individual bot owners to ask them to comply
with the bot policy’s limit, sometimes without success.
Recently, we discussed removing the noratelimit feature for the bots group
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T258354>. This would have as an effect
to *limit the edits to 90 edits/min for most of the bots* ; the few bots
that need an unlimited rate to function (for example MassMessage) can be
added to the existing accountcreator group (with the possibility to rename
this group).
Many thanks to bot owners who gave input in the comments of the ticket
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T258354> and helped us frame this
solution. If you want to continue the discussion, please have a look at
these comments, so we can build from them and avoid restarting the
discussion from scratch.
We hope that this solution will allow a fair access to mass editing
Wikidata, while preserving the existing infrastructure and avoiding hitting
too hard on the Query Service. In the meantime we are working together with
the Search Team at the WMF and others on improvements to the Query Service
scalability and alternatives to it so some load can be redirected to other
systems, as well as general infrastructure improvements.
Unless there’s a strong opposition from the community to this change, we
will implement it on October 20th.
If you have any questions or need more information, feel free to add a
comment in the ticket <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T258354> or onwiki
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Project_chat#Remove_noratelimit_for_bots>
to avoid too many messages on these mailing-lists.
Thanks,
--
Léa Lacroix
Community Engagement Coordinator
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.
Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24
10963 Berlin
www.wikimedia.de
Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter
der Nummer 23855 Nz. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für
Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/029/42207.