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

[Birgitte SB]

--- On Thu, 5/29/08, White Cat <wikipedia.kawaii.neko at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: White Cat <wikipedia.kawaii.neko at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: [WikiEN-l] Bot policy for all wikis
> To: birgitte_sb at yahoo.com, "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Date: Thursday, May 29, 2008, 1:35 PM
> There is no reason to panic. Just because a bot gets a
> technical bot flag
> does not mean we bot operators will go out of our way to
> wreck projects. We
> are reasonable people. A note on the global bot fag request
> page or a
> general "global bot noticeboard page" can do
> wonders in such a case.
> 
> As for the problems experienced on wikisource, they are not
> technical ones.
> The problems there are purely cultural and often
> consequences of centuries
> old disputes (such as the bible case). This however is not
> the time and
> place to discuss that.
> 


I don' know why you read "panic" in my message, but it is not how I am feeling about this. 

You are incorrect about the problems being "cultural".   Unless you understand the fact that there are commonly multiple translations of a work in a single language while the interwiki system only allows 1:1 links to be cultural.  Personally I think the developers will someday work out a technical solution to this problem, but for now we need to avoid running the script built for Wikipedia on Wikisources. 

I don't understand why an "interwiki" bot, whose script should not be running on a Wikisource should be given a flag to operate there.  While I do fully believe bot operators will not go out of their way to wreck projects, I don't see any reason to give such an easy opportunity for unintentional harm to be done.

Birgitte SB