[Toolserver-l] RFC: Further improvment of the interwiki-bots-situation

[DaB.]

Hello all,

since the begin of 2011 the number of new interwiki-bots is slow down because 
of a change in the approval-policy. So step 1 of the improvment of the 
interwiki-bots-situation is done.

The next step (I call it "step 2") I would like to discuss with you is the 
following:
*Creation of a multi-maintaincer-project (MMP),
*Creation of a database for this MMP,
*Adding of all new interwiki-bots after 1. February,
*Adding of all old interwiki-bots until 1. May.

The idea behind this is that all interwiki-bots have a common database to 
access at the end. That should help to avoid a common problem with interwiki-
bots: They don't know about each other.
I quite often find discussions about the following problem in the wiki-
projects:
"I read the article de:foo 2 weeks ago and found that it has a interwiki-link 
to en:foo in it – but this was wrong so I corrected it to en:bar. Last week I 
found that a bot deleted en:bar and put en:foo back – and that is still wrong 
and I corrected it back. I also contacted the bot-owner. Today I found that 
ANOTHER bot removed en:bar AGAIN and put en:foo back – and it is STILL wrong!! 
I don't  like to speak with every bot-owner and corrected 200 wikimedia-
projects!"

If all interwiki-bots would have a common database, this problem would vanish 
very soon I guess (at least for the toolserver-interwiki-bots, but non-
toolserver-interwiki-bots are not our business and the wikimedia-project 
should handle that problem). Just having a table with "wrong" interwiki-links.

What step 2 is NOT:
-All interwiki-bots will run from the MMP,
-There is only 1 interwiki-bot for everything.

Every bot will still run from the account (ts-account AND wikimedia-project-
account) of its owner and in his/her responsibility. But the owner (and the 
bot) will have access to the common-database of the MMP, which he/she can use 
to improve his/her bot.
I'm sure that the pywikipedia-bot-developer (and the other bot-framework-
developer) will support this sooner or later too.


I would like to read feedback about step 2 from you (if there is no feedback, 
I will proceed ;-) )

Sincerly,
DaB.

-- 
Userpage: [[:w:de:User:DaB.]] — PGP: 2B255885
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