Are closed source bots prevalent? Isn't part of the BRFA process evaluation of the underlying code? Any admin bot should probably be relatively slow, and make up for the slowness with long periods of uptime. Some of the paranoia is a bit farfetched - it shouldn't be incredibly difficult to get well designed bots that don't screw up, and notice when they do. It might be exceptional among bots, but it should still be possible. Bot RfA's have been doomed from the outset recently, because most of the !voters don't have the technical skills to evaluate whether or not its well designed (myself included).
On Jan 18, 2008 6:28 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
On 18/01/2008, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 18/01/2008, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
What's wrong with giving bots sysop access? Are you worried they might rise up and overthrow the human sysops?
More or less. There's lots of paranoia on en:wp about admin bots going batshit in sorcerer's apprentice mode. Though I don't think it's warranted, as *anything* an admin can do is easily reversible except history merges. (Making those *easily* reversible is one for the wishlist.)
But that's not true when bots are involved. A human can only screw up at roughly the same speed as another human can fix it, so it's not a big deal, but a bot can screw up a million times in a few minutes - that's not practically reversible without using another bot to undo it all, which takes a lot of preparation (the bot needs to be written, tested to make sure it's not going to screw things up even more, and approved - that's likely to take a day or so at least).
Personally, I wouldn't object to open source admin bots ("With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow." or whatever the quote it), but closed source ones are too likely to go wrong and are thus too risky (the chance of them going wrong is still quite small, but the potential damage is enormous, so the risk is still high). Also, an open source bot can probably be modified by any programmer to fix its own mistakes quite easily, doing that with a closed source bot requires the author. (So a closed source, supervised bot wouldn't be so bad, but I'd still rather not have them.)
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