[WikiEN-l] BetacommandBot, (currently) centralized discussion

[George Herbert]

On Sun, Feb 24, 2008 at 4:16 PM, <WJhonson at aol.com> wrote:

>
> In a message dated 2/24/2008 3:58:57 P.M. Pacific Standard Time,
> george.herbert at gmail.com writes:
>
> There is  complete transparency in what Betacommandbot is  doing.
>
> <snip>
>
> Is there any part of that which is unclear  to you?
>
>
> ------------------------
> Yes the transparency part.  But it's not *unclear* exactly.
> BC has refused to allow transparency into the code of his bot.
> We cannot determine what the bot exactly is using as its rules of
>  conduct.
> So we cannot satisfactorily determine that it is actually in accord with
>  the
> community consensus.
>

One can deduce that by going through the articles it's tagged, seeing what
it tagged for.

Everyone who has done so has, with rare exception, identified only proper
taggings, where there was no fair use rationale or where the rationale
failed to list the page used on properly.

The assertion that it's doing something wrong is not born out by the
evidence.

If you think it's doing something wrong, you need to provide evidence to the
contrary.

A bunch of people being upset does not override the admins trust in
Betacommand's good judgement on programming the bot and his understanding of
policy and his willingness to enforce it as written.  Evidence that
Betacommand had written the bot to do something else could change that, but
in all the looking at it that's been done to date, nobody has found anything
other than minor programming goofs, and Betacommand is actually rather
prompt about fixing those if they're reported to them.

He is credible because what he's done is in the public record and has been
widely reviewed, and felt to be appropriately policy compliant.



-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com