On Sun, Feb 24, 2008 at 4:16 PM, WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
In a message dated 2/24/2008 3:58:57 P.M. Pacific Standard Time, george.herbert@gmail.com writes:
There is complete transparency in what Betacommandbot is doing.
<snip>
Is there any part of that which is unclear to you?
Yes the transparency part. But it's not *unclear* exactly. BC has refused to allow transparency into the code of his bot. We cannot determine what the bot exactly is using as its rules of conduct. So we cannot satisfactorily determine that it is actually in accord with the community consensus.
One can deduce that by going through the articles it's tagged, seeing what it tagged for.
Everyone who has done so has, with rare exception, identified only proper taggings, where there was no fair use rationale or where the rationale failed to list the page used on properly.
The assertion that it's doing something wrong is not born out by the evidence.
If you think it's doing something wrong, you need to provide evidence to the contrary.
A bunch of people being upset does not override the admins trust in Betacommand's good judgement on programming the bot and his understanding of policy and his willingness to enforce it as written. Evidence that Betacommand had written the bot to do something else could change that, but in all the looking at it that's been done to date, nobody has found anything other than minor programming goofs, and Betacommand is actually rather prompt about fixing those if they're reported to them.
He is credible because what he's done is in the public record and has been widely reviewed, and felt to be appropriately policy compliant.