[Toolserver-l] Interwiki-Bots

[Conrad Irwin]

> 
> So my idea: Amalgamate all interwiki-bots (in the same programming-language of 
> corse) into 1 multi-maintainer-project. The advantages would be, that we would 
> use lesser resources, the bot-maintainer could work together, they could use a 
> database together, it would be easier for wikimedia-project-user to contact us 
> (in jira for example or with a mailinglist), if something is wrong, it would 
> be easier to contact the bot-software-maintainer and so on.
> 
> Any thoughts about that? Good idea or a "you had too much hot water in the 
> shower"-idea?
> 

This has already happened for the main namespace on Wiktionary, see
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/User:Interwicket. Obviously it's easier
for that bot because wiktionary interwiki links are always between
identical titles.

I think it is very sensible to have "the toolserver" be responsible for
all interwiki linking on projects (including other namespaces on
wiktionary). Doing so would allow a shared database of "correct" links
to be built, particularly for articles that are known to be problematic
(hey, there could even be a web interface for reporting errors).

Whether the toolserver should be responsible for making "all" interwiki
edits is more debatable, but it would certainly be useful to create a
more central place for this to happen.

Conrad