On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 3:50 PM, Birgitte SB birgitte_sb@yahoo.com wrote:
No one expects bot owners to intentionally do harm. But people would not be aware of these issues unless some bot owner had once thought it a good idea to run the Wikipedia script on another project.
Maybe one solution is to put a cap on these flags for now. If we only have a dozen bots to worry about; it will be easier to watch for them and for all the owners to be informed of these issues. But if there are an unlimited amount of flags given out and they become some sort of trophy for bot owners at some point the information is going to be lost.
10 very well organized bots which constantly work may keep interwiki links up to date at the monthly level at the best. And this is only for Wikipedias. This means that around 20 bots may keep interwiki links up to date at the monthly level for Wikipedias. Maybe 5 to 10 more are needed for Wiktionaries. All other projects need 5 to 10 more. So, fair minimum is 40. And I am not sure that we have more than 100 active bot owners.