[Pywikipedia-l] Humans vs bots: 0:1

[Marcin Cieslak]

(cross posted to wikitech-l)

Hello, 

Recently we have found a case of incorrect interwiki entry linking [[:pl:Aktywizm]]
describing philosophical concept with family of the articles on other Wikipedias
regarding political activism.

This was a human mistake and it was reverted later. However, there seems
to be no way to tell all the interwiki bots running to stop re-adding this
removed link to articles. 

I have added {{nobots}} on the Polish and English Wikipedia to prevent
spreading of incorrect linking. I have tried from time to time to use
my own pywikipedia bot to remove the link (using -localright option)
and the result is the following:

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ro/wiki/Activism?action=history

(Saperka is my script) 

I spoke with the owner of WikitanvirBot and we have stopped it for
a while completely to allow the "undo" script run and remove the links.
Unfortunately, some other bot (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ro/w/index.php?title=Activism&diff=5071856&oldid=5071793)
changed the link again.

It seems like it is not possible to revert one mistake unless
ALL running interwiki bots will be stopped by their owners.
Sounds like an overkill (and imagine coordinating this!).

Is there some way interwiki.py could be improved (I know it should be
all different architecture) or some other way to handle this
- one could imagine - simple case?

Or are we now overtaken by robots beyond our control? :)

//Saper