[Foundation-l] Proposals for the first global roles

[Birgitte SB]

--- On Fri, 5/30/08, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Proposals for the first global roles
> To: andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk, "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Date: Friday, May 30, 2008, 6:59 AM
> On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 1:40 PM, Andrew Gray
> <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 2008/5/30 Mohamed Magdy <mohamed.m.k at gmail.com>:
> >
> >>> Besides that, most interwiki bots
> >>> will run on all languages of one project
> rather than various projects,
> >>> so interwiki bots for other projects would
> normally not come to
> >>> wiktionary to edit there.
> >>
> >>  Exactly, you would ask for a global flag on
> wikipedia or wiktionary or any
> >> other project... not a global flag for every
> project created..
> >
> > My understanding is that the tool we have is
> "global everywhere"; we
> > don't have the capacity to say "global on all
> Wikipedias", etc.,
> > without doing it manually, which is... well, what we
> had before.
> 
> Yes, but a person who is running bot from, let's say,
> German
> Wikipedia, will never reach any Wiktionary. And if a bot
> owner is
> enough trusting to have a bot privilege on Wikipedias, it
> is really
> paranoid to expect that such person will abuse their
> privileges by
> writing case-insensitive links/pages on Wiktionaries; even
> this is not
> default at pywikipediabot, as Andre said.


No one expects bot owners to intentionally do harm.  But people would not be aware of these issues unless some bot owner had once thought it a good idea to run the Wikipedia script on another project. 

Maybe one solution is to put a cap on these flags for now.  If we only have a dozen bots to worry about; it will be easier to watch for them and for all the owners to be informed of these issues.  But if there are an unlimited amount of flags given out and they become some sort of trophy for bot owners at some point the information is going to be lost.

Birgitte SB