On 4 February 2014 11:21, Fæ faewik@gmail.com wrote:
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.
That's unfortunate, Fae. It's meant to say "I don't have the knowledge to analyse whether or not your bot works, so I would defer to those who do." I don't think I'm qualified to figure out whether or not your bots, or anyone else's bots, should be operating on Wikipedia.
I'd have the same answer to a developer who wanted me to review code, or an engineer who wanted me to look at his designs for an internal combustion engine. It's just knowledge outside of my scope.
Risker