At 03:52 AM 5/6/03 +0000, Tomos 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.<snip> 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.
- 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.
From what you describe, the bot should not cause any problems. The objections to bots are that they overload either Recent_changes or the processors, neither of which will happen here.