There is also the fact that an admin bot account can be compromised, I think
I would be easier for an admin to run the bot in their admin account, one
less account to worry about, its not like you need a bot flag for one delete
a day.
Chris
On Jan 18, 2008 3:28 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 18/01/2008, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
On 18/01/2008, Tim Starling
<tstarling(a)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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