Jeff Raymond wrote:
MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
What's the point of showing everyone the code? Are we afraid the owner is going to abuse the bot?
What's the point of hiding the code? Why does it have to be kept a secret?
And yes, I know there's discussion at the RfA talk page, but "vandals might use the code" is a poor rationale for not keeping it open. There's no good reason to keep it secret, but the headcount is going in the support column regardless, and that's a shame that it doesn't look like the arguments regarding openness of the code (suddenly the "we shouldn't accept things that are less free" folks are quiet) are going to gain any traction.
For things that go into the MediaWiki codebase, yes, they do need to be not only made public but in fact licensed under the GPL. For something that Robert or anyone else is running on their own computer, not really. Of course it would be _nice_, from an ideological perspective, if all code was public and free, but in practice I see no grounds for demanding this.
In fact, I personally feel there's way too much bureaucracy going on here, and perhaps even in the "ordinary" bot approval process as well. The way I see it, it's really no-one else's business how people choose to make their edits and other actions, whether they do it manually in a browser, assisted by user scripts, with a fully-automated bot or by telnetting to port 80 on en.wikipedia.org, and whether they do it from one account or several, as long as they admit which accounts are theirs.
If they disrupt Wikipedia, they should and will be blocked and stripped of their other privileges just as readily whether they do so with a bot or in any other way. And if a trusted user should ask that an alternate account of theirs be provided with a subset of the technical abilities they have already been trusted with, why, that should be a mere routine technicality that any bureaucrat or steward should be able to satisfy upon a simple request.
It seems our approval procedures have gotten to the point where we're just creating bureaucracy for the sake of bureaucracy, and even demanding that things be discussed and !voted upon twice just so that people whose participation on Wikipedia is centered around a single project page should not be, god forbid, made to follow a link to another page in order to participate in a centralized discussion there.
(Yes, I'm aware I'm digressing a bit from your specific point. Sorry for the rant, I just felt the need to get it out of my system after reading some of the comments on that Rf-not-really-A page.)