On 01/02/2013 03:03 AM, Bináris wrote:
Before generalizing it will be very useful to overview various wikis. According to the interwikis, very few wikis have an explicit bot policy like enwiki and even less have BAG. Definition of a bot may vary, too: in the bot policy of enwiki only automatic processes are called bots, while in other projects the so-called "assisted edits" may also qualify as botwork. Enwiki!=Wikipedia.
I explicitly said "for wikis with bot approval processes", and "a large wiki". Nowhere did I say all wikis or all Wikipedia wikis met either of those criteria.
I am aware of AWB (assisted edits) and the like. I don't think they should fall under this idea.
A bot approval group could certainly encourage people to participate in this dashboard. For the bot writer, all it should take is a HTTP POST to the dashboard every few edits to check in (which could be a simple as "350 edits for task XYZ in the last hour", in appropriate format).
This "all it should take" is not so trivial for everybody, and may require rewriting a plenty of running bots.
It's not trivial, but it's about the same as a single API call (many bots at least use the API for edits, others do multiple API calls), and probably easier than screen scraping.
Matt Flaschen