[Wikipedia-l] use of a bot (long)

Tue May 6 10:01:48 UTC 2003

It should be ok ;-) im not an op, but there have been other...far more useless bots (50,000 pages
of extremely homogenous and trivial US census data).

Anyway, before you do bot, maybe there is now enough reason to finally get a good discussion code
into wikipedia.

I feel that phpbb (which is GNU ) is the best open source bb out there, and I know for a fact that
its very international friendly.

How about you confirm that it handles japanese to your liking.

If not, then you can still work with the phpbb people to make it better or use the other board
that you are already using.

If so, then we're set, and this start snowballing people into action.
--- Tomos at Wikipedia <wiki_tomos at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Hello. I have a question about the use of a bot.
> 
> After some trials-and-errors, we wikipedians in Japanese 'pedia are now 
> starting to use an outside BBS (prepared by one of the active wikipedians) 
> for our discussion of basic policies and other site-wide issues. And in 
> conjunction with it, we are wondering if it is okay to use a bot to 
> automatically update a page within wikipedia (something like 
> [Wikipedia:Discussions_at_WikipediaBBS]) which displays info. on recent 
> postings occuring at the BBS.
> 
> Now I think I should explain two things - why we (some of us) think outside 
> BBS is good, and why the bot is helpful for that.
> 
> 1. Why we think outside BBS is good
> 
> For discussion purposes, we have three options.
> Meta, talkpage, and some dedicated pages in the Wikipedia namespace.
> 
> Meta is not user-friendly because its interface is in English.
> 
> We tried talk pages, but there happened too many discussions of overlapping 
> topics, and it was hard for latecomers to join, because the discussions are 
> taking place in many places (some unknown to the newcomers), hard to 
> reconstruct the dialogue spanning multiple talkpages. It is also difficult 
> for anybody to revisit the past discussions and decisions, because the 
> records are scattered.
> 
> Then we tried Wikipedia:Village_pump as a place for discussion and 
> decision-making regarding site-wide issues - naming conventions, spelling 
> conventions, disambiguation policies, admin selections, basic style and 
> layout issues, and so on. Some are re-doing of what people did in English 
> wikipeida, some are more or less unique to Japanese wikipedia. We faced some 
> problems again. The major ones are (a)32kb limit for some browsers, and (b) 
> too many issues to be discussed within the limited space (though we used 
> subpages, etc.). I can also point out that (c) there are several yet-to-be 
> understood bugs/troubles related to display and character encoding (some 
> characters turn jibrish, some characters automatically get deleted, some 
> characters are visible only in editing box, and at least a few more), and 
> outside BBS is a good place to discuss about the problem without being 
> annoyed by the very problem we talk about. Some others pointed out (d) 
> Wikipedia is slow or down too often these days, and it is better to have 
> outside place we can work on.
> 
> While at least some of us think that we can improve the way we use 
> Wkipedia:Village_pump and make it workable, (and of course I cannot deny 
> that there is a possibility that the BBS turn out to be problematic in other 
> ways,) many of active users think we would try the BBS for now.
> 
> 2. Why the bot is helpful
> 
> 
> 2. Why a bot is helpful
> 
> Bot is good for two reasons. It saves users time by automatically creating 
> the content that the user would want to post. It helps others (those of us 
> who do not always check on the BBS) to stay informed of what's going on in 
> the BBS.
> 
> As it is preliminary designed and implemented, the bot does two things: (a) 
> automatically create a page content for a specific page something like 
> [[Wikipedia:Discussions in the Wikipedia BBS]] and (b) with a click of a 
> mouse, the user will be taken automatically to the edit mode of the page 
> (now in wikipedia) with the auto-generated content. -The content is not 
> saved/posted at this stage. The user still has to confirm the content by 
> pressing the "save" button.
> 
> In other words, the bot does not automatically update any content. It 
> generate the content that users can save.
> 
> I am aware that some of you are quite against the use of bot. So I offer 
> some defense here.
> 
> First, the Special:Recent_changes will not be flooded. The bot works only 
> with a human confirming the content. The pace of the activities cannot be 
> faster than that of humans.
> 
> Second, the way it works, it cannot be abused by some mal-intended users to 
> overload the server.
> 
> If no objection, some of us would complete the bot and show to admins for 
> the final check.
> 
> Many thanks,
> 
> Tomos
> 
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