Some of you might have seen that I did write a bot to edit on Wikipedia. Actually it is not a bot per-se, but a framework to be able to write wikipedia bots. I have used this framework to make a new and consistent lay-out for all the nl: year pages, and currently its two greatest hits are automatically adding consistent interwiki links and semi-automatically disambiguating links to disambiguation pages. I am running these robots on the nl: wikipedia only, and I think that is the way it should stay. My idea is that if a language wikipedia agrees to have a robot sniff around, it should be handled and monitored by someone that is a very regular visitor of that language. Now of course I am getting into trouble with this: there are other people that want to run this software. First other user was Andre Engels. I just gave him a copy of the code. Then there was Christian List on da:, and he got a copy. But then more people working on wikipedia started asking for the code, and recently also people that have other instances of the wikipedia software running for other projects. I am quite fond of free software, but here I am hesitating a bit: if I give out the code to a growing select few, maintenance for me is going to be a nightmare. Now, I could just start an open source project at sourceforge to collaboratively develop it further. BUT: I am afraid of the power of this software, and the damage it could do if it ends up in the wrong hands (vandals). On the other hand, it is not very difficult to write a vandalizing robot for wikipedia, and I haven't heard anyone did it so far; why would it start if a decent piece of robot software would be freely available? I'd like to evoke a discussion on this list to help me find a solution to this. What do wikipedia developers and admins think about it? Regards, Rob Hooft -- Rob W.W. Hooft || rob(a)hooft.net || http://www.hooft.net/people/rob/