[Foundation-l] Fwd: [foundation-l] Bot policy on bots operating interwiki

[Andre Engels]

2007/9/7, Peter van Londen <londenp at gmail.com>:

> I would like to turn this also in a technical issue. Interwiki/Interlanguage
> (there is a difference between interwiki and interlanguage, most people mean
> interlanguage when talking about interwiki) organized as it is
> (decentralized), is becoming more and more a problem, because:
> * amount of edits needed, growing exponentially with growth of languages
> * multiplying the mistakes (wrong interlanguages) through bot actions.

And even removing them might be reverted if not done well enough,
although on the other hand in many cases bot interwiki grinds to a
halt after an error because of what you mention in your next point.

> * bots are set to automatic, which means that only the easy interwiki's are
> done. The difficult interwiki's, requiring handmade changes language
> knowledge and investigations, are not done.

I rarely set my bots automatic, preferring to disambiguate the
problematic cases. I might be the exception, however. And even so,
there are still plenty of cases where I decide to just let it go.
Which brings me to the fourth point:

* The bots work from the assumption that interwiki links form an
equivalence relationship - that is, that when A has an interwiki to B
and B has one to C, that there should be interwiki B to A and C to B
as well - and that there should be only one interwiki from a given
page to a given language. Unfortunately, there are cases where this
assumption fails. For example, some languages have a municipality in
Denmark and its main town as separate pages, others as one page. To
make things worse, in some cases this latter page is basically about
the town, in others about the municipality. Those two pages one would
like to connect to each other, but to different pages in a language
that separates the two. In the current setting this is impossible
(well, we could define something to notify bots of this situation, but
one would need to define and add comments on almost each language to
make it work, not to mention that all bots as well as involved human
editors should know them). If one would create a new system as
proposed by you, it could be worked in (something like "if in a
language there is no page in this 'ring', make an interwiki to that
ring instead").

> Talking about interlanguage some feature requests come into my mind:
> * a possibility to limit the shown interwikis, set in the preferences
> * a possibility to set the order of interwikis, also set in the preferences.

If one would have a system like the one you describe, I would like to add:
* a possibility to also show interwiki that are already defined, but
for which the target page does not exist yet.

-- 
Andre Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels