On 4 February 2014 15:54, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
Risker, out of interest, considering my long track record of useful bot-work on Commons, would you support my proposal to let Faebot do some sensible non-controversial work on en.wp or do you think I am a danger to Wikimedia?
I'd defer to the opinion of the Bot Approval Group, Fae. Bots have done
(and continue to do) extremely useful work on English Wikipedia. They've also been involved with some difficult-to-fix harm (usually unintentional, by poor programming or without understanding of underlying content issues), and unfortunately there has been a pattern of a handful of bot owners not cleaning up those sorts of problems. This has resulted in the bar being raised for everyone.
The issue of bot article creation is one that will vary widely from project to project depending on the culture and philosophy of the community. If we think a bit, we're all likely to come up with a project or two that expanded rapidly with the use of bots, only to find that the content added had to be removed because it didn't meet copyright requirements or was of very poor quality. On the other hand, we've also seen brilliant successes. And yes, there was some fairly significant early expansion of English Wikipedia through bot article creation. Some of those articles have barely been touched since - except by other bots.
Risker
I take that as a no.
Fae