[WikiEN-l] Servers down?

[Simon Walker]

ClueBot and VoAbot do this - I assume you mean that sort of style?

Stwalkerster


On 18/01/2008, James R. <e.wikipedia at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'm sure some of the keen programmers around would like to see the bot
> code
> for any such sysop-based bot that might hit BRFA just to look for any open
> errors or programming holes in the code. But for the unfortunate bots, we
> always have access to the tools we need to remove it.
>
> Another idea is have a Wikipage that has the bot controls in it, and have
> it
> full protected so that admins can start and stop the bot whenever a
> problem
> occurs. e.g. BotName looks at [[User:BotName/controls]] and sees that the
> param in the edit box is "botstatus=on;" and then continues its duties at
> the sandbox. If it sees "botstatus=off;" it kills the process altogether
> and
> waits a certain period before trying again.
>
> I've seen it around, just cannot remember where I found it ;)
>
> - E
>
> --------------------------------------------------
> From: "Nathan" <nawrich at gmail.com>
> Sent: Saturday, January 19, 2008 12:25 AM
> To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Servers down?
>
> > Are closed source bots prevalent? Isn't part of the BRFA process
> > evaluation of the underlying code? Any admin bot should probably be
> > relatively slow, and make up for the slowness with long periods of
> > uptime. Some of the paranoia is a bit farfetched - it shouldn't be
> > incredibly difficult to get well designed bots that don't screw up,
> > and notice when they do. It might be exceptional among bots, but it
> > should still be possible. Bot RfA's have been doomed from the outset
> > recently, because most of the !voters don't have the technical skills
> > to evaluate whether or not its well designed (myself included).
> >
> > On Jan 18, 2008 6:28 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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