[Foundation-l] Fwd: [WikiEN-l] Bot policy for all wikis

[White Cat]

I have seen many wikis do *not* grant bot flag because
... "there are far too many bots with that flag"/"they do not feel they need
a bot"
... they are inactive (as in no one edits the wiki regularly aside from
existing bots and stewards who only remove spam)
... there is something minor on the local bot policy that is in the way.
... the bureaucrat / the community (made out of fewer than five local people
for example) says so

Wikis should grant interwiki bots bot flags because
... each interwiki bot generally only operates from a certain wiki. This
means the bots "input" is all pages on a spesific wiki. For example a bot
operating off of ja.wikipedia would check if all wikis link to the pages on
ja.wikipedia and *update non-ja.wikipedias* if they lack the necessary link
*to* ja.wikipedia
... inactive wikis do need to get updated because other wikis are still
active. Waiting a week or more for a bot flag there or even put a request is
a waste of time. A list of inactive wikis should be compiled and and the
interwiki bot policy should be applied by default. Since no soul is active
on inactive wikis, there is no one to complain
... local personal preferences should only matter to local users. A
"foreigner" who is only there to deal with mindless automated tasks should
not deal with cosmetic issues. You would need to translate the local bot
policy to each and every used language otherwise. Bot flags should not be
made a big deal.
... on very very small communities (made out of fewer than five local people
for example) people who allow/disallow a bot base this decision on
subjective reasons rather than objective ones. Smaller communities do not
understand that bots can break down due to various reasons. It is the bot
operators responsibility to clean after the bot, there is no question about
that. But hard blocking the bot or denying it a flag because it broke once
or twice isn't objective.

----

It should not be necessary to "test" bots that use standard code for
standard mindless tasks such as interwiki linking double redirect fixing or
commons delinking. If a spesific python code works properly on one computer
there is no reason why it shouldn't properly work on another computer.

Granting of the bot flag for tasks like interwiki linking, double redirect
fixing, commons delinking should not be based on a vote.

     - White Cat

On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 1:20 AM, masti <mst at warszawa.pl.eu.org> wrote:

> Yaroslav M. Blanter pisze:
> > We do have a bot policy:
> >
> > [[:meta:Bot policy]]
> >
> > It is implemented in all small wikipedias I am active. Bot owners (in
> > theory) leave a request at a special bot page, if there are no objections
> > within a reasonable time (a week or so), the steward grants the bot
> > status. Once I had to report on meta and actually ask stewards to grant
> > the bot flag for some of the old requests on os.wp.
> >
> > You may be sure the small wikis suffer much more when a bot can not get
> > the status since the list of recent changes becomes unusable - this is
> for
> > instance what is right now happening with the newly created wikis.
> >
> > Cheers
> > Yaroslav
>
> the problem is in some wiki you get rejection because "the bot is
> involved in to few projects". Hmm.. how ca it be involved more if one
> cannot apply?
>
> masti
>
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