On Sat, 05 Jan 2013 10:03:13 +0100, Matthew Flaschen mflaschen@wikimedia.org wrote:
For example, on pl.wiki, there are basically only two kinds of bots: interwiki-only and multipurpose. As long as you're not breaking anything using the bot and not doing anycontroversial changes, if you've gotten the flag, you can do any task you deem necessary. A bot control in this case simply wouldn't work.
Bots could still tell the dashboard what they're working on, even if they don't need permission to add a new task.
In this case, when you're saying "bots", you actually mean "users", as for one-time runs it would end up being the user's job. This simply seems impractical.
And if we try to make a compromise by making the bots automatically report edit summaries somewhere, then well, what's the improvement over simply looking at recent changes? You could make a summary of last edits by bots using two lines of code and one API call, no need for a "control systems".