[WikiEN-l] Servers down?

[Christopher Grant]

There is also the fact that an admin bot account can be compromised, I think
I would be easier for an admin to run the bot in their admin account, one
less account to worry about, its not like you need a bot flag for one delete
a day.

Chris

On Jan 18, 2008 3:28 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 18/01/2008, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 18/01/2008, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> >
> > > What's wrong with giving bots sysop access? Are you worried they might
> > > rise up and overthrow the human sysops?
> >
> >
> > More or less. There's lots of paranoia on en:wp about admin bots going
> > batshit in sorcerer's apprentice mode. Though I don't think it's
> > warranted, as *anything* an admin can do is easily reversible except
> > history merges. (Making those *easily* reversible is one for the
> > wishlist.)
>
> But that's not true when bots are involved. A human can only screw up
> at roughly the same speed as another human can fix it, so it's not a
> big deal, but a bot can screw up a million times in a few minutes -
> that's not practically reversible without using another bot to undo it
> all, which takes a lot of preparation (the bot needs to be written,
> tested to make sure it's not going to screw things up even more, and
> approved - that's likely to take a day or so at least).
>
> Personally, I wouldn't object to open source admin bots ("With enough
> eyes, all bugs are shallow." or whatever the quote it), but closed
> source ones are too likely to go wrong and are thus too risky (the
> chance of them going wrong is still quite small, but the potential
> damage is enormous, so the risk is still high). Also, an open source
> bot can probably be modified by any programmer to fix its own mistakes
> quite easily, doing that with a closed source bot requires the author.
> (So a closed source, supervised bot wouldn't be so bad, but I'd still
> rather not have them.)
>
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