Wikipedia talk:Bot policy/Archive 19

Writing a bot

Anyone able to help me write a bot that will revert obscene image vandalism with edit summaries such as: Example: (BOTNAME: Reverted edits by UserName to last version by OtherUser - obscene image removed)

If anyone knows anything about how to do such a thing in Python, I'd appreciate the help! --SunStar Net^talk 23:16, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

Did you miss the large banner at the top of the page? See Wikipedia:Bot requests to request that someone write a bot to do something. . See also Wikipedia:Creating a bot Cheers - PocklingtonDan 09:59, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

Bot history

People watching this page might be interested in Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Newsroom/Suggestions#Rise_of_the_bots. Also, does anyone here want to have a go at updating Wikipedia:Types of bots and Wikipedia:History of Wikipedia bots, which could be interesting if they were updated. Carcharoth 04:04, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

Change link please

Wikipedia:Bots (protected) suggests users might be looking for Wikipedia:Bot policy. The main page for bots is not now Wikipedia:Bot policy but Wikipedia:Bot. Please can this be changed. Cheers - PocklingtonDan 10:39, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

I realy don't agree with you on this. Everything on Wikipedia:Bot is redundent to this page. I'm inclined to decline the request. ---J.S (T/C/WRE) 18:10, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

You misunderstand, this relates to the link on Wikipedia:Bots that reads "This page is needed for AVB at the moment, you likely want Wikipedia:Bot policy". I believe this should be changed to "This page is needed for AVB at the moment, you likely want Wikipedia:Bot". I couldnt add this request to that talk page because it redirects to this talk age. If you've ended up at Wikipedia:Bots chances are you are looking for Wikipedia:Bot, not specifically the page just on bot policy. With me now? Cheers - PocklingtonDan 18:34, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

I didn't misunderstand... What does Wikipedia:Bot has that Wikipedia:Bot Policy doesnt? ---J.S (T/C/WRE) 16:36, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

I'm hoping this change will keep you both happy. Luna Santin 00:42, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

Policy of not allowing Spell-checking bots to be automated. How to change this?

What is the process please for trying to build a consensus for change of policy on this point? It seems unecessarily harsh. I believe that automated spell bots should be permitted. The only quoted reason for not allowing them currently is "It is not technically possible to create such a bot that would not make mistakes". I do not see this as a good enough reason for not allowing automated spell checking bots, on the basis that the same rule does not apply to other types of bots - AntiVandalBot, for instance, frequently makes false positive matches, yet is allowed to operate. Even if the policy was changed to allow spellbots, each individual bot would still have to go through the rigorous bot request for approval process and satisfy the bot approval group that it operated in a satisfactory manner. I would like to get a consensus to change this policy. - PocklingtonDan 18:42, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Lets have a compromise IF you think you can get a bot that can Pass BRfA we could give an exception IF AND ONLY if this bot has a zero chance of error. As with there bots like AVB the risk reward ratio and the issues of the past have forced us to create such a bot. there have been many Anti vandal bots that have come along since but have been shot down in BRfA. I propose that if you can get a solid enough bot that you go ahead and code it and see if it passes BRfA. Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)} 18:59, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

OK, that sounds reasonable. I am trying to gather suggestions for rules that help rule out the possibility of erroneous edits. Once I believe I have a robust enough ruleset I will start a bot RFA. - PocklingtonDan 19:53, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Err... why would the bot need to be an admin? ---J.S (T/C/WRE) 16:38, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

No one said anything about admin - RFA=RequestForApproval. - PocklingtonDan 17:31, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

Don't foget thaty spellling mistaks sometimes need to be kept. [sics] Such as on talk pages. They can demonstrate a contributor's grasp of spelling. Also, sometimes people are discussing and quoting spelling mistakes. Even in articles. Maybe we need a way to label deliberate spelling mistakes in articles. Please don't correct spelling mistakes on talk pages. Thanks. Carcharoth 17:37, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the tip - all this and more is being discussed at Wikipedia:bot requests, various safeguards are being considered to prevent exactly what you outline. The bot would not in any case make any edits to talk pages. Thanks - PocklingtonDan 18:12, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

See also this thread just above. Really, a spellchecking bot must be semiautomated, i.e. all its edits must be reviewed. There are just far too many reasons why an intentionally-misspelled word might be used, and no way to protect them all from the bot, or program the bot to detect them all. —Steve Summit (talk) 23:45, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

Barnstars (Wikipedia:Barnstars)

Maybe a redirect link there? {Slash-|-Talk} 02:46, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

OrphanBot

There has been numerous complaints on User_talk:OrphanBot, but the bot is still running. What should we do? Kirils 19:43, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

You're joking, right? -- Ned Scott 08:33, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

Um get over it, the bot is working fine its users who dont tag their images properly is the problem. Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)} 14:27, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

The bot does not do any good. Plese read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:OrphanBot Kirils 12:16, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

Agreed. The bot says that it does not delete images meeting certain criteria and yet it does. It's a flawed bot.

Whenever someone has their image deleted, we get calls from all sides to block the bot and/or remove its approval. Take up any greivances at WP:ANI or at User talk:Carnildo, where people will be happy to explain why your image was marked for deletion. OrphanBot cannot delete image - it only adds tags to them to indicate flaws in their copyright status. It is an administrator who ultimately deletes the image. OrphanBot does a lot of good for the project, and is sadly not appreciated enough. Thanks, Martinp23 15:55, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

• Okay, I for one greatly appreciate the work this bot does in helping deal with poorly/improperly tagged images. This used to take a lot of time from many people to identify these images for review/deletion. This bot deals with a lot of the tedious legwork. As Mart pointed out, the bot only marks the images for possible deletion, it does not actually delete them; that is done by a human administrator. If people actually read the upload page and followed the instructions, this bot wouldn't be needed for this task. That page boldly states that images will be deleted if not properly tagged/licensed. A lot of uploaders seem to think that "fair use" means no copyright. In any case, kudos to the bot and its owner. RedWolf 23:52, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

Shadowbot

I would like a couple of more eyes to review Shadowbot's behavior. My comment is here. --Dystopos 14:48, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

The BAG has kept a very close eye on shadowbot. and there are many people that are also watching 15:09, 29 January 2007 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Betacommand (talk • contribs)

For what it's worth, I have made the following suggestions at User Talk:Shadowbot:

1. Avoid reverting the actions of editors who restore links deleted by Shadowbot unless the question of spamming is incontrovertible.
2. Explain the action of the bot in the edit summary or talk page with reference to its actual parameters (User:Shadowbot/Blacklist) rather than to a policy which it is incapable of interpreting on its own.
3. The message "Please stop adding inappropriate links to Wikipedia. It is considered spamming and will be removed. Thanks," assumes bad faith, and should be changed to something like "The link you have added points to a site identified as a possible source of spam by User:Shadow1. If the link meets the requirements of WP:External links, contact an administrator to shut off the bot and leave a message at User Talk:Shadowbot to alert me to the error." --Dystopos 18:30, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

new section

I just added a new section on Repairing damage. —Steve Summit (talk) 23:51, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

6w3

I don't know about bots, so I'm posting here with a concern. 6w3 seems to be acting like a bot, but it has no info on it's user page so I don't know who the operator is. It's going around tagging all images that have copyright info in a non-standard format as being unlicensed. Macduff 17:34, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

it is a bot. it is moving too fast to not be. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by ONX (talk • contribs) 19:35, 11 February 2007 (UTC).

It's editing a max of 3 or 4 times a minute. I think a competent human with a tabbed browser could achieve that rate fairly easily. --Gwern (contribs) 01:47 12 February 2007 (GMT)

It does seem to be too fast, but as it only made 25 edits I don't think any action is needed right now. — xaosflux ^Talk 03:24, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Bot edit rate from WPP

I have confirmed with the developers via the wikitech-l mailing list that there are no technical issues with bots editing faster than the six edits a minute currently allowed by Wikipedia:Bot Policy. Would anyone have any objections to changing the policy to allow editing at rates of 15 edits/minute? That would leave four seconds between edits, enough time to stop a malfunctioning bot before it makes too many bad edits. This would not affect the recent changes, as bot edits are hidden by default, and if a bot hit a large portion of your watchlist you can hide bot edits by simply clicking the "Hide bot edits" link. — METS501 (talk) 17:36, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

I think allowing good and proven bots to edit faster is a good idea (maybe not for new bots, but that would be for the BAG to decide). We have so many edits now that bots don't really overwhelm recent changes anyway. The watchlist issue is slightly different: as far as I can tell, if I turn on "hide bot edits", any article that has last been edited by a bot simply disappears from my watchlist. Is that the intended behavior? Kusma (討論) 17:42, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Agreed -- we already put bots past an almost absurdly tough process. Even if we don't trust all of them with a higher edit rate, why not some of the long-term, tried-and-true successful bots? I wasn't actually aware that we had any particular limit; think of the good HagermanBot could do with more edits, for example. – Luna Santin (talk) 19:01, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

No objection. The six per minute rule is already ignored in many cases anyway. I would suggest though that fast should not be the default bot rate, but rather than bots be allowed to push the speed limit only if there is an argument for why faster editing is useful. For example, bots that response to user actions (e.g. antivandal) might be able to do more (assuming any of them are in fact obeying a 10 second rule right now), but on the other hand things like adding dates to tags can be completed at a leisurely pace, since it doesn't really matter if the run takes 10 hours or 2. And if there should be a problem, slower is still better. So, yes higher speed seems fine, when necessary/useful. Dragons flight 19:22, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

OK, it seems like there's consensus here and on the mailing list. I've updated the relevant policy accordingly. — METS501 (talk) 23:42, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

My understanding of the emails is that limits are important because of the review they allow, not because of any performance issues. I've made that explicit in the relevant section. --Gwern (contribs) 05:22 22 February 2007 (GMT)

I've seen the posts on the mailing list and here on wiki, for a day or two...we've made a few edits to this so far, but perhaps we should take more time in developing new verbiage here on the talk page before modifying this policy any more, consesns may have been reached between a few people on the mailing list, but that may be a little short of determing a consensus of the community. — xaosflux ^Talk 04:12, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

I support increasing the rate for proven bots. Wikipedia edits are still increasing exponentially (between October 2005 and October 2006, the number more than doubled, per this, and there is no reason to expect that there will be any slowing in the next year or two. We should allow a faster rate of edits by proven bots simply to keep the project functioning at the same level as before. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 15:15, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Ok, two cents from an irregular since you want a wider consensus. The overall rate of bot edits across all bots is outside the scope of my opinion. An individual bot's edit rates should be determined by 1) how well trusted a bot is at the task it is doing, 2) what the task is, and 3) how hard it is to undo the bot's work. I offer expansion of each point below, but not a suggestion as to precise wording.

For #1, trust is a matter of demonstrated success at a given task, with no to extremely low error rate. An old bot taking on a new task is on the same footing as a fairly new bot, and should have a similar edit rate throttle. A bot on a trial run should have a lower throttle setting than after it has been demonstrated to work on a trial basis.

For #2, anti-vandalism seems very high priority, tagging talk pages with project banners seems very low priority, and implementing a CfD close would be intermediate. The sense I'm trying to convey is that defending content comes before minor enhancements, and that article content comes before community discussion.

For #3, actions that require special access levels should be most restricted. If we ever had a bot that it would take oversight levels to fix (never would be too soon for one of these) would require extremely tight throttling, a bot that takes admin rights to fix would need extra throttling, and the default bot that any editor can fix the mistakes doesn't need extra throttling from this criteria. GRBerry 15:20, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

In response to the above: 1) Bots in a trial period usually edit 1-2 times a minute, and that has not and will not change. 2) I agree 100%. 3) Basically all bots perform basic editing functions that can easily be reverted by an editor or an admin with the rollback button. —METS501 (talk) 19:05, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Personally, I think that a limit on the edit rate is not important, because many people who run a bot create multiple accounts for the bot anyway, so they can have their bots running at 24 edits a minute (6 edits times 4 accounts). Just because I have all my bot's actions on one account doesn't mean it needs to edit any slower. —METS501 (talk) 19:01, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Um, what? People should under no circumstances be running multiple instances of a bot without specific approval of such. Matthew Brown (Morven) (T:C) 08:41, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

The only case I'm aware of where multiple copies of a bot are running under different usernames is the antivandal bots. --Carnildo 09:55, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

and the AIV bots. Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)} 13:15, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

And AFAIK, these are not just multiple accounts, but multiple OPERATORS, not just one operator running a bunch of bots under seperate threads. — xaosflux ^Talk 02:34, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

We need an equvilant to robots.txt for bots

What would be nice is a meta tag or something that will direct a bots of a name or all bots to avoid a page (maybe even a section). Something that all bots should try to respect. I would like to use something like this a on a few pages that bots love to chomp (my user page for one). ZacBowling^talk 04:33, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

I don't think we need this. If a bot has a bug it should be fixed instead of protecting some selected pages against it. -- memset 15:58, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

I see we already have Template:Bots. -- memset 16:25, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Problems with internationalization bots

Four different internationalization bots have mistakenly tried to link Gaff rig to it:Gaffe in the past couple of weeks. While "gaffe" may very well be the Italian word for "gaff," the meaning of it:Gaffe is "gaffe" as in "faux pas," not "gaff" as in "four-sided sailing rig." Complaining to the individual bots in question won't really solve the problem; what's needed is a way to prevent future i14n bots from edit warring on this point. I turned off bots altogether with \{\{nobots\}\}, but that's a rather blunt instrument, and specifying individual bots to allow or deny doesn't help, either, because the next internationalization bot to come along will repeat the same mistake. Some sort of categorization of bots, with the ability to lock out a particular category of bots, would be awfully helpful here. Susan Davis 18:11, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

This was not the fault of a bot but of an incorrect link at it:Gaffe, which was also created by a bot because there was a link from fr:Gaffe to it:Gaffe. I corrected this in all wikipedias, so the link shouldn't reappear. -- memset 19:27, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Well it did, but only because someone manually added the wrong interwiki links to it:Gaffe again.

I dont' think it's necessary to have a category to disable interwiki bots (or even all bots) for specific pages. From what I know these problems are always caused by incorrect interwiki links somewhere (in some other wikipedia), it is better to fix these links instead of just disabling the bot. See User_talk:Yurik/Interwiki Bot FAQ#The bot keeps adding back an incorrect link to site xx, what should I do? -- memset 08:19, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

Problem with Thijs!bot

This is another internationalization bot that makes erroneous links. Several have been pointed out in User talk:Thijs!bot but the operator makes a point of not checking his English talk page. Instead he refers editors to his Dutch talk page, which is incomprehensible to most people. IMHO he should not be using bots to edit pages unless he monitors talk pages in all the languages his bot is making edits in. -- Harumphy 11:00, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

Programming a bot

Can bots be written in PHP or VisualBasic?  ~Steptrip 21:32, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

yes. alphachimp 21:41, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

Bots can be written in any environment that can send and recieve HTTP requests – Qxz 18:14, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

In terms of easy availability of easy to use bot frameworks, I'd suggest as languages of preference Python, C#, Perl and (I think) PHP. Martinp23 20:57, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

You Have New Messages

Bots don't trigger "you have new messages", right? --TeckWiz ^ParlateContribs_@ 02:03, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

To avoid that message all you have to do for accounts flagged as bots is mark the edit minor. Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)} 02:09, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

Incorrect edits by bots in Rock Against Communism article

More than one bot has added it:Veneto Fronte Skinheads to the Rock Against Communism article as if it is an Italian version of the same article. A quick look shows that they are not about the same topic. I left a message on one of the bot's talk page awhile ago, but I can't find that message again. Clearly it is a problem with the bot itself, so that should be corrected.Spylab 16:21, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

The problem is not with the bot. The problem is that the Italian article has an interwiki link to Rock Against Communism, and the bots are merely adding the corresponding link to the Italian article. --Carnildo 22:18, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

• Will someone please volunteer to delete the Rock Against Communism interwiki links from the it:Veneto Fronte Skinheads article? I don't have an Italian Wikipedia account, and I don't really want my IP address listed in the edit history. Spylab 21:04, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

Featured.py

The featured.py bot make this [1] kinds of mistakes, can someone see what's wrong? - Warddr 11:40, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

Policy Change

Due to the recent issues with Betacommand and more specifically the bot issues surrounding the ArbCom case, I want to try to update the bot policy to be clearer. First, I would like to add information on the treatment of admin bots. We have unwritten policy, but it should be added for clarity. Secondly and more importantly, we need to clarify the types of bots and what their levels of oversight are. For example, we differentiate in the approvals process between "Unsupervised Automatic", "Supervised Automatic", and "Manually-Assisted". The term "semi-automatic" is not really defined, but is being floated around. None of those terms are defined on the policy page. The first two always require approvals and the last may or may not. The last issue I'd like to cover is what role bot policy and the approvals process should play in development of "semi-automated" scripts. Betacommand believed that running his script was ok because he manually confirmed everything, because frankly that's what policy says. However, he was running too fast and as such ran afoul of policy. That said, what if he ran it slow, at say, 2 edits per minute? Do our policies apply in that case? The script is still making automatic decisions that could be run improperly, so does such a script require approval or not? -- RM 17:37, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

Admin Bots

Proposed: No sysop shall operate a bot that uses any of their privileged functions without explict permission from the Bot Approvals Group and consensus from the community. — xaosflux ^Talk 01:57, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

I don't know if this is a good idea. On the one hand, no admin bot has ever gotten consensus from the community. On the other, trying to do so usually leads to the desired functionality showing up in the MediaWiki software. --Carnildo 07:06, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

There are at least 3 adminbots being covertly run at this time. This is an issue I have been planning to raise in April once I get back from my current trip. Dragons flight 09:58, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

BAG has been treating admin bots as requiring approval, and the community seems to clearly want an RfA for admin bots. I might even modify the wording to say "consensus from the community, usually thorough an RfA". -- RM 13:11, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

I strongly disagree that the process should be organized as an RFA. RFAs are about trusting a person. Bot approval is primarily a technical concern, i.e. is there a job that needs doing and can the proposal at hand accomplish it without creating other problems. I'd encourage the whole process to occur at BRFA, but with prominent notice to the community at relevant talk pages and noticeboards. Unlike RFA, BRFA also accomodates refinements and testing; the simple up-down vote of RFA is not well designed for the bot development process. Many of the collateral comments at the ProtectionBot RFA, and subsequent discussion at WP:BN concerned the fact that having an RFA for a bot was inherently silly, and the need for a non-RFA approval process. Dragons flight 13:24, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

There may be some lack of clarity here. The problem lies in the fact that RfA is designed to determine whether or not we trust a user with tools. If said user wants to use a script with those tools (as has been suggested a number of times, notably with the TorBot), this is no longer simply a matter of trust. An RfA cannot determine whether or not to trust the script, because it has everything to do with whether the script is safe, which a bot approvals verifies. On the issue of trust, an admin script running with a bot flag requires more trust than an admin script running without a bot flag, so in cases where a bot flag is required, we always require both an RfA and a bot approvals. If a bot account requested admin priveledges on RfA, they would be asked to seek permission here as well. An RfA is always requires if it is a bot account with admin priveledges. A bot approvals is always required if a bot flag is requested or the admin bot is running in a non-manually assisted fashion. You argue that RfA is about trust, bot approval is about technical merit. An admin bot or script requires both. Silly or not, the only community approved place to receive admin bot priveledges is RfA. What is unclear is whether or not a bot approvals is required for a manually assisted admin bot (which could be run from the main user account). I would argue that due to the nature of such a bot that yes it should, but I would like more comments on this issue. -- RM 12:02, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

In case I was unclear, we should not have two approval processes. We should work to create one unified approval process. That is my opinion for all sorts of adminbots, and there is a substantial section of the community that agrees with that. Even several bureaucrats have said they want to see adminbots approved without an RFA. Someone who is already an admin is trusted. They can do no greater damage with a second flagged account than with their first, and having the second account makes it easier to track bot actions, not harder. Computer code can't be "trusted", it either works or it doesn't, which is a purely technical concern. As long as we make this process so much harder than it needs to be, we are going to contniue having fully automated deletion and blocking bots being run only in secret, which is also not a good thing. Dragons flight 15:31, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

I think the community would see a difference between an automatic/unsupervized admin bot, and a javascript tool that admins use to streamline operations. The line is blurred when the tool is used without the operator really checking. I get the impression that some of the admin interfaces are pretty poor and could benefit from tools. A really high edit rate suggests a lack of genuine human oversight, but if an automated task is checking everything that can be mechanically checked (say for CSD, going through the history for any removed prods, checking talk page for hangon templates, generating diffs with appropriate context, and whatever else needs to be done for human oversight), then this tool should be endorsed and made available to all admins, no? Gimmetrow 02:07, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

We also should be careful with assuming fast editing means it's a bot, because I've clocked 40 deletions in a minute fully manually, for example deleting old images. I might have a script load the pages, their history, and whatlinkshere, making sure each image is OK, and then have it load all of the delete pages using tabs in Firefox for all the checked images, and then press the trigger for each one (click, ctrl-tab, click, ctrl-tab, etc.) —METS501 (talk) 03:07, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

Ralbot causing HTML errors

Disucssion moved to WP:BOWN. — xaosflux ^Talk 13:54, 7 April 2007 (UTC)

Another WP:B redirect

WP:B could also be looking for Wikipedia:Be bold in updating pages. I'm not sure if I should add it to the template yet. If fact, I'm not sure how. Chrishyman 23:45, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

Hmm - I'm not too sure on that one - WP:BOLD seems to be the more obvious redirect, but if there is confusion out there, then the disambiguation tagline should probably be added - I'm just not convinced :P. Martinp23 23:51, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, just thought so because I actually thought WP:BOLD and WP:B linked the same. Heh, heh, I'm just lazy at typing 3 more letters. Chrishyman 02:56, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

Tawkerbot and Helpmebot

Both bots in the Wikipedia bootcamp room are missing. Real96 18:43, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

I think toolserv went down at some point, taking most of the bots not set to automatically restart with it (by the way, I'm guessing here, by the fact that my bots on toolserv had all left screen, having been restarted in a cron job). Your best bet would be to contact Tawker or Tangotango. Thanks, Martinp23 18:47, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

Policy clarification

I think it would be wise to specify a specific maximum edit rate a user may edit at. There is a concern raised at Betacommand's Arbitration case about this, I'm not sure how related to the case it is, but it should be something of common sense. Any fast editing of more then say 10 edits per minute over a period of 5-10 minutes can be considered botlike activity and a bot account should be used. The exact numbers is not a major concern, its the idea.

So this is what I propose, adding a new line to Wikipedia:Bot_policy#Assisted_bots that says something to the effect of editing faster then XX edits per minute for a duration of YY minutes can be considered something that needs its own account. X and Y can be whatever, I suggest 5-6 edits averaged over 5-10 minutes. Just tossing the general idea out from the arbcom case. —— Eagle101 ^{Need help?} 03:16, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

Also, just thought of this, if this is not wanted, and we want to allow users to edit at any old rate then that should also be stated in the page. —— Eagle101 ^{Need help?} 03:17, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

New policy idea

Let me start by saying that I'm just throwing this idea out there to generate discussion. I haven't decided whether I support it yet. To reduce the overhead on BAG, to prevent WP:CREEP, to avoid allegations of shrubbery, and to advance the project might it be a good idea to have some trusted bot users (Cyde and Rich Farmbrough are possibilities) who can take actions that are not likely to be controversial without further approval? I think BAG is important, and I think some sense that administrators can't make up rules for themselves is important, but perhaps we can find a way to make everyone happy without being inconsistent. --Selket ^Talk 09:59, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

I'm a little bit troubled by Cydebot's block log and talk page. They seem to indicate that it would be appropriate for all of Cydebot's actions to be approved... alphachimp 12:24, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

Who is going to decide who is a "trusted bot user" and on what criteria? Миша13 13:17, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

What exactly is "shrubbery"? I also feel (with no disrespect intended to Cyde at all) that CydeBot's block log doesn't suggest a trouble-free existence.

Is it really too much to ask to fill out a proposal and wait between half an hour and a few days for approval? (Indeed, Cyde could have started the task whilst waiting for approval, and if weren't going so fast probably would have slipped under the radar). --kingboyk 14:10, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

Edit rate policy

I believe the edit rate section of the policy is unnecessarily wordy. It also needs to be updated to reflect recent opinion of the devs (up to 60ppm for large, important tasks) and the new maxlag parameter. In particular, bots which implement maxlag (without being too aggressive in the setting) need not have a specified maximum edit rate at all. --kingboyk 17:09, 27 April 2007 (UTC)

Isn't that only looking at one factor? Even if a bot isn't a server hog, there may be other factors that play a role in an edit rate limit, such as ability to track contribs, or to limit edits should a response or block be needed. Gimmetrow 04:50, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

Rewrite proposal

Reading through the MfD of BAG I have gathered some observations and thoughts regarding a rewrite of our bot policy. Here's some points I believe we should change. First the BAG:

1. BAG is renamed to "Bot Advisory Group"
2. BAG becomes like a WikiProject, with the consqeuence that membership becomes open (no cabalistic elections, which btw are not sactioned by any policy right now) - anyone can join if they feel they can contribute in a above-the-average capacity (non-members are of course welcome to bot discussions as well)

Now on to issues of bot operation and "approval":

1. (relaxing bot policy) Anyone can run a bot without approval (zomg! but don't worry - keep reading)
2. Any administrator (we trust their good judgement, don't we?) can block a bot that:
   1. floods recent changes (because the operator didn't ask for approval and hence didn't receive a flag for the bot)
   2. is doing something controversial (in the admin's opinion) and doesn't have a link to approval discussion (because the operator didn't ask for approval, d'oh!) for the task performed - this point covers the potential danger created by 1. - if you have a non-controversial task to run and know what you are doing, just go ahead - otherwise you need some consensus on this - the "risk" is yours
3. if an operator is unsure of the impact of his task or wants a bot flag to be able to edit faster, e brings it to approval forum where:
   1. (as stated above) both members and non-members of BAG discuss the idea
   2. to accomodate for a wider community input, links to approval discussions may be crossposted to interested noticeboards (related WikiProjects, Village Pump, etc.)
   3. if there is a consensus among BAG members on the technical feasibility of the task and no objections are raised (or are raised and resolved) from the wider community, the task is considered approved - no {{bot approved}}, {{bot rejected}}, {{bot trial run}} (or whatever are the templates named)
   4. if a flag was requested and in the course of discussion BAG agrees that it's needed, a bureaucrat may flag the bot
4. the bot's userpage should have all its tasks listed, together with links to archived approval discussions - this is needed to make 2.2. live - if you have approval, you're fine; if not, you risk a block

Since this is just a rough sketch, additional input is welcome (in case I missed something and you spot a gaping hole in this system). Миша13 09:47, 28 April 2007 (UTC)

OK, here are a few gaping holes:

1. Anyone can do whatever the hell they want until they get caught, even if it violates MoS. Remember that bot that went through changing American spellings to British?
2. I think most everyone agreed that an entirely open BAG was a bad idea, for much the same reason that open bureaucratship is a bad idea.
3. Sometimes people have good ideas but screw up the implementation. In this case, a trial is a Good Thing.
4. Noone lists approvals on the bot's userpage, they're supposed to, but noone does it.

There is no control in that, it's anarchy, and anarchy doesn't work. ST47Talk 12:47, 28 April 2007 (UTC)

1. (inserting a comment here) See User:Bot523; I linked to the approval before you made that comment. --ais523 11:11, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

My view:

1. How does that differ from now? Anyone can violate MoS on a great scale under their own account (doing it manually, of semi-automatically). Same thing - until they get caught anyone get do whatever they want.
2. I think not. What I noticed is that community wants BAG to become an advisory group, not a body capable of binding decisions - that's pretty much unlike bureaucratship
3. Where did I suggest not doing trial runs? This may well be a part of building a consensus for a technical "approval" of the bot.
4. Time to enforce that, maybe?

It's not lack of control - it's less WP:CREEP. Миша13 18:54, 28 April 2007 (UTC)

I'd question whether or not the proposal would have any chance of success when under community-wide scrutiny. Weakening the system for theoretical benefit is not something that *most* people want. A major policy change could take months to hammer out if it is similar to some of the other official policies that have changed. That effort could be spent on actually solving the real problems facing approvals.

1. This would never work, even with caveats. This is a very longstanding policy decision. We're lucky we even have a policy that allows bots. The community has always erred on the side of not having any bots before risking ones that malfunction. Things have changed, but I don't see a major paradigm shift to the opposite extreme.
2. An administrator can already do everything on the list, even if the bot is approved. That's why many bots have a big red button, to avoid being blocked, but it amounts to the same thing: Any administrator can block a bot and because it's not a person, there are no hard feelings (in theory). In practice, however, admins are wary of using this power over bots. I can't see this changing, so your solution won't work because you're asking admins to do more than what they won't do now.
3. Almost all bots fall under this category. Even those that do not need a bot flag often are subtly complex enough to need the oversight. Some of your ideas are interesting, but I think in practice they already exist. For those projects large enough to need the oversight of, say, a Wikiproject, we already require some sort of community consensus before we'll approve of certain tasks. We could post links to the WikiProjects or other locations, but that's just going to add another bureaucratic step. You solve the problem of participation, and then we can talk about adding more responsibility. Good idea though.
4. It would be nice if bots had this on their bot's user page. My own bot doesn't even have that, although it isn't running either. This is a good idea as well, except that we lack the manpower to enforce it. At the moment it is only a recommendation and requires no bot policy change.

You have some good ideas, but in general your suggestion is to change the process so that approvals are totally optional at the discretion of the operator. You also want to rename BAG which won't help anything. Is this a "control the language, win the argument" type of thing? -- RM 16:24, 28 April 2007 (UTC) -- RM 16:24, 28 April 2007 (UTC)

1. I don't see how community conservatism is any grounds for not attempting to reform (regardless of which way the reform would go) :)
2. Time to change the admins? (seems like a problem with conservatism, again)
3. The way I have built the proposal is such that 3. allows people to run trivial maintenance tasks (such as substituting/renaming templates) without having to worry about filling in approval form DX443-F17a correctly (which may take more than actually writing and running the bot combined) and at the same time, properly enforced 2. prevents from problems - again a matter of making admins more willing to block oddly behaving bots
4. Again a matter of policy enforcement. Luckily we have methods for that. (although it may seem harsh)

Please AGF on my side - I'm trying to address as many issues as possible, the main two being "process too complicated" and "BAG has too much power", while retaining a safe-for-the-wiki policy. I'm not saying my idea is perfect - just hoping that with some ironing it can be a good solution. Миша13 19:10, 28 April 2007 (UTC)

I think this proposal doesn't reflect the way the wind is blowing on the MFD at all. Please see the section above for a more pressing proposal based on recent dev feedback. I'll try and get something written later if nobody beats me to it. --kingboyk 16:39, 28 April 2007 (UTC)

Then perhaps out perceptions of the MfD are different. I'd also like to see some comments from non-members of BAG. Миша13 19:10, 28 April 2007 (UTC)

I support this as long as it's not a permanent block. --Rschen7754 (talk - contribs) 04:12, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

• I don't support the above proposal. I think that bots are too potenttially damaging to let them run until caught. I think that approval for bots should continue to be mandatory. It is my view that there are four main questions involved with any bot application:

1. Does the community wish to ahve a particular task or tasks performed by a bot?
2. Does the community trust a particular operation to use a bot properly and only fo the approved tasks?
3. Is there a technical reason why the particualr function should not be performed by a bot at all?
4. Is the partiular script proposed safe and reliable? Is it unlikjely to cause unexpected harm?

Questions 1 & 2 require community consensus, and any editor should be able to express an opnion, just as at any XfD or policy decision. Questions 3 & 4 are technical ones. Any user should be able to discuss these, but the group of recongnied technical specialists in the subject (which i presume means the BAC) should have a veto on any bot based on any "NO" answers to these questiosn. So no bot should run unless there is a community consensus of YES on 1&2, and no BAC veto on 3&4. A trial run might be mandated on any othese, but particualrly on 3&4. Taht is my view, as a non-member of the BAC, and a paerson who does not operate a bot, but is a software developer off-wiki. DES ^(talk) 20:56, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

The reason we are conservative with bots is because we want humans to do the work. We want humans to do the work, because we want humans to think. If we didn't want people to think, we'd use bots.

In some situations, you really don't care whether someone is actually thinking, or thinking is unimportant. In those cases, using bots is fine.

Some people are misrepresenting policy as thinking that people haven't allowed bots because bots are dangerous. I don't think anyone much cared about that at all.

--Kim Bruning 16:54, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

No. We should have machines do as much as possible. Machines are meant for work. It is a sin to force a human to do anything a machine could do as well. --Gwern (contribs) 17:23 1 May 2007 (GMT)

We want humans to do the creative work. Those jobs the require only deterministic decisions can be done by machines. We want and encyclopedia, not for people to do work. ^High_InBC^{(Need help? Ask me)} 17:34, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

Just a comment! I have noticed people saying that "bots are too potentially damaging to let them run until they get caught". Um, Cydebot ran for 2 days at speeds greater then 50 edits per minute. Thats with BAG.... just a heads up on that one. Anyone can run a bot, and its possible that they do it without "approval" in either case. (with present bag) and future bag. —— Eagle101 ^{Need help?} 01:12, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

Shadowbot blocked

I have blocked this bot for 24 hours so that the repeated reversion of valid links on 7th Armored Division (United States) can be fixed. See here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Discussion is here. DES ^(talk) 07:38, 29 April 2007 (UTC)

Shouldn't laugh, but that's the first time I've seen a bot blocked for edit warring. I hope he got a 3RR warning first? :) --kingboyk 11:12, 29 April 2007 (UTC)

There weas a request (which i linked to above) that the link in question be whitelisted. the problem is, the organization of past members of the 7th AZrmored has its official site on a members.aol.com address, and the bot keeps removign it as spam. This is quite frustrating for the editors involved, who asked for help on the helpdesk soem time ago. DES ^(talk) 18:28, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps we can have a rule where bots will not alter a line that has "<!-- NoBot -->" in it. ^High_InBC^{(Need help? Ask me)} 18:30, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

High thats a bad idea, if spammers learn about that and use it, it prettymuch renders shadowbot and or AVB (Martinbot) ineffective. —— Eagle101 ^{Need help?} 01:14, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

Resolved

 – Operator fixed the bot so it shouldn't happen again. See User_talk:Shadowbot#Blocked. --kingboyk 18:44, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

A note on MFD and reform

This page is somewhat relevant to the recent MFD on the Bot Approvals Group, so I'll post some information here. I have recently closed the BAG MFD as "reform", as that is generally what the community has called for. Some of the main concerns raised were:

1. The name "Approvals group" gives the impression that this process is regulatory in nature, instead of the "Advisory group" as it should be. Several users have toyed with the idea of moving to Wikipedia:Bots/Advisory group.
2. Several users noted that the regulation of BAG membership has made it into a "cabal". Nobody has proposed any method to fixing that, other than moving to a more "RFC style" Bot request for approval. Concerns were expressed regarding the control of bots on Wikipedia by a select few.
3. People have requested that the process become "less formal, less bureaucratic" and into something more open to the community at large.

Of course, some people also expressed the sentiment that it isn't broken, and doesn't need to be fixed. I wish the community and BAG luck to whatever you plan on doing. This is a cross post to multiple venues. Sean William 14:02, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

Since this is a cross post, I would suggest discussing changes to BAG on Wikipedia talk:Bots/Approvals group and leave discussions about specific policy changs (if any) to this page. -- RM 14:54, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

Just to make this absolutely clear

One is permitted to run an untagged, unrecognised, undeclared, unapproved bot, provided it does not edit at a rate fater than one edit per two minutes. Is this still an entirely correct interpretation of the guidelines on this day?

If not, why was this changed?

--Kim Bruning 16:33, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

I believe the text is located here. Gracenotes^T § 02:21, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

Of course, those have to manually approved. That clause seems to have been in the policy for a long time. Gracenotes^T § 02:25, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

Still need approval? How long has that been a rule? --Kim Bruning 18:38, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

I think saying they need "manual approval" is referring to how they are operated - the operator is supposed to verify each edit individually, rather than let the bot run without supervision. The relevant policy is at Wikipedia:Bot policy#Assisted bots, which says an assisted bot does not necessarily need approval, referring to the BAG process. Any script editing at a reasonable pace, with specific supervision that replies promptly to questions, is pretty much indistinguishable from any other editor. Gimmetrow 19:34, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, when I said "manually approved", I was referring to the edits, not the bots. Gracenotes^T § 01:17, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

You only need approval if your bot is running without human confirmation, or editing at an excessive speed. At least that is my understanding. ^High_InBC^{(Need help? Ask me)} 01:21, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

Yeah. That's the way it's been for years and years. --Gwern (contribs) 01:28 3 May 2007 (GMT)

Yes, although the "excessive speed" item has come into question recently; some of the logic behind enforcing it rigorously had been shown faulty. Gracenotes^T § 01:45, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

I might want to run a bot that does a couple of edits per *day* (yes, per day), automatically. I want it to be a bot, because bots are known to be impartial. <very innocent look> . Do I even need to be here, or can I just go ahead? --Kim Bruning 02:42, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

My understanding is that all automatic bots should be approved. However, if you are only editing your own userpage or subpages, and not doing any admin operations, my impression is that's fine. Gimmetrow 03:09, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

Oh. Well that's not cool. :-/ --Kim Bruning 20:08, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

In general, an automatic bot operating in their own user space while complying with bot policy is exempted from the single requirement of an approval. For example, this allowed me to run certain tests on a sandbox in my userspace before doing anything else with it. It's a useful exemption that I don't think has had any problems. All other bots need approval by mandate of the community via bot policy. The policy on bot speed will likely change in the near future due to developer clarification. -- RM 20:20, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

BAG reform proposal

The admin that closed that MfD noted the cautionary shot that was fired over the bow of BAG; if action is not taken, action will be taken for them.

Reading Wikipedia_talk:Bot_policy#Rewrite_proposal, a number of points are raised. I'd like to refocus on one particular point. As it stands, BAG is not open to membership. One must pass an election process to get in. The arguments in favor of this arrangement have focused on the desire to not add additional work to the bureaucrats, thus taking the responsibility of determining consensus on bot approvals from the bureaucrats and placing it with the BAG.

There's a number of inherent problems in this, not least of which is that to get on the BAG, you have to be voted in by the current members of the BAG. This was derided in the MfD by a number of people.

I propose that BAG be reformed such consensus making decisions are made by bureaucrats, and not by an elected BAG person. We're not talking about a huge amount of traffic here. Looking at the log, we've been averaging about 23 flaggings per month. If RfA is any measure, about 1/10th of these are ones that might be marginal. This isn't an onerous amount of work.

This proposal removes

• the election to BAG board
• the BAG as a subset of the community; the community becomes BAG
• moves consensus on BAG discussions to bureaucrats

--Durin 15:30, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

Seems a good idea; anyone could comment on bot proposals anyway. The only drawback I see is that it introduced a forced delay in bot approvals: while in the current system a bot could be spedily approved by a BAG member, the new system would presumably include a required wait (such as for AfD, Prod, RfA) for community input. Tizio 16:25, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

• The current system incurs bureaucracy and while community input is welcome, only BAG members, selected by BAG members, get to decide if a bot is to be approved or not. This is inherently anti-community, and creates an echelon of users in Wikipedia. The last thing we need is yet another striation of user in Wikipedia. Yet, that's what the current system does. --Durin 16:31, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

  You probably misread my comment; I support this proposal. The only technical detail that needs to be fixed is a way for speedily approve a task. Tizio 16:40, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

  How is BAG anti-community when it is elected in an open election? Whether or not you like another level of user, so to speak, does not matter. Making a bureaucrat do it limits community involvement since BAG *is* a subset of the community. -- RM 17:16, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

Everyone can comment on bot proposals as it is now, without any reform. I think you may be underestimating the work. The work done at bot approvals isn't just flagging, it's also checking new tasks for existing bots. These approvals have not historically been done in a fixed timeframe like RfA. It's more comparable to the featured articles process. There is an open discussion. This is checked periodically, and approved or denied when a consensus is reached. If the bureaucrats want to regularly check over bot discussions and decide which ones are ripe for a decision, that would be fine, but do you have any evidence they want that task? Ever since Wikipedia:Bureaucrats has had a section on flagging a bot (since about six months ago I think), it has mentioned BAG. Gimmetrow 16:45, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

• I don't see how this is an argument in favor of having a bureaucratic process by which people have to be unanimously elected by current members in order to have the privilege of determining consensus. This creates a special class of users. There's no need. If you're worried about bureaucrats being able to do this work, then ask them. It's not like they're not entrusted with determining consensus already, and the amount of work we're talking about here is not large. --Durin 16:48, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

• Please stop spreading misinformation! Anybody who had actually read the debate would know that the assertion that BAG members "have to be unanimously elected by current members" is totally incorrect. The vote is a community vote, not a BAG vote. --kingboyk 17:28, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

• You will see in a comment made two minutes before yours here that I already conceded this point, but that the general point remains. Please stop spreading misinformation that I'm spreading misinformation :) --Durin 18:06, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

• Shouldn't you ask the bureaucrats before increasing their workload? Have any bureaucrats even commented on this discussion yet? Gimmetrow 16:52, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

While telling the bureaucrats in advance sounds a good idea, I don't think that we should be setting policy based on the amount of work a particular group of users have. More bureaucrats can be elected, if needed. Tizio 17:02, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

• Agreed. And Gimmetrow, again the workload is quite low. --Durin 17:04, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

• From my perspective, the workload doesn't seem low. But if the workload was not an issue, why did you even mention it? Gimmetrow 17:25, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
  • As an example, requests at WP:CHU as served quite quickly; that process is simple, I agree, but could not be so fast if the crats were overworked. The mention to their workload is reasonable, as other processes cannot certainly be delegated to them; certainly, we cannot ask bureaucrats to close AfDs. Tizio 17:55, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

• More bureaucrats cannot just be added as needed. They require a RfB that requires an extremely high level of support. I myself failed such a request when I desired it for bot purposes, however, I'd be willing to stand for it again if required. Perhaps they would take the new requirements and circumstances into consideration, but you're naive to think that it is an easy. -- RM 17:20, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

• The crats work within this system and haven't complained about it. I think that's all we need to know isn't it? --kingboyk 17:28, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

Here are my thoughts on the matter:

1. Why does no one even pay attention to the facts? Do they matter to anyone? The basic premise here is wrong. BAG is not elected by BAG, it is elected by vote of the community and closed by a bureaucrat if there is non-unanimous result. Elections notices are posted to various noticeboards. Typically about 50% of voters are non-BAG members. It is not the fault of BAG or this process that you refuse to see that.
2. It is true that BAG membership requires a vote to be a member. This is because technical expertise is required by the community. BAG cannot be open to everyone without a policy change, which was not authorized by the MfD. I also do not understand the logic behind your proposal. You wish to take consensus determinations away from BAG because it is elected and place it in the hands of the bureaucrats that are also elected. That makes no sense. Why is one ok, but not the other?
3. Changing from BAG to Bureaucrats has no advantage. It increases bureaucrat workload (they have not been asked to do so) and slows down the process. You're essentially adding additional bureaucracy to a process that has no actual complaints. When has BAG not done a good job?
4. Consensus can and should be determined by non-bureaucrats. This is vital to the success of the project.
5. The community has full input into approvals. Any other explanation ignores the facts.

-- RM 17:13, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

Under the new proposal, the bureaucrats would evaluate consensus, not take a technical decision, as the BAG currently does. As it has been noticed in the past, bot approvals require both technical and policy knowledge. If you agree that BAG members has been chosen based solely on their technical skills, it's clear that the current system is flawed. The recent de-sysopping of a BAG member for ignoring the bot policy speaks volumes. Tizio 17:21, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

The two potential problems I see with this are the issue of trial edits and the potential to create voting rather than discussion. Currently the BAG typically authorizes a set of trial edits as a first pass before final authorization. Would we allow a blanket exemption, say 10 trial edits before posting the RfBot? Also, I think the discussion format rather than a voting format, particularly on the esoteric technical issues, is very important to an efficient bot approvals process. We should look for a way to ensure that this remains in the new process. One thing I do like about this is that if the bureaucrats are approving RfBots, then all bots should have the bot flag and there can be a guideline such as, "it is prohibited to run a bot without the flag". --Selket ^Talk 17:16, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

(ec)Your comment has some misconceptions over bot policy. Bot flags are *only* given if edit counts are high enough to justify it. Bots with few edits or those in trial period are not given the flag so that the community can monitor the changes through recent changes and watchlists to ensure that no errors occur. Bots are only given the flag as a last resort, that is, when there are too many edits that it cluttering watchlists and RC overrides the benefit of community oversight. The bot flag must always be given selectively. -- RM 17:27, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

Trial edits prior to the first bot approval seems like a bad idea. We don't want people to spend hours working on a spellchecking bot. However, for subsequent task approvals, doing 50 trial edits and showing the diffs would seem (to me) the natural way for a speedy approval process. Gimmetrow 17:25, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

A bot's first trial is only approved after the task is clarified and approved on a preliminary basis. A spellchecking bot would not pass the prelimary stage and would never make it to trial. -- RM 17:29, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

Briefly, Seklet was suggesting trial edits "before posting the RfBot". That wouldn't work for a new bot. Gimmetrow 17:47, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

The closer didn't get it right in my opinion. The mood was "keep, but discuss reform" imho. Closing it as "reform or else" was plain wrong afaic. So, please, by all means discuss reform but don't make out that it's "reform or be gone" because that's not what the community said at all. --kingboyk 17:23, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

That's actually more of what I meant. If I wasn't clear, I'll go back and change my closing statement around. Sean William 17:30, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. It seems to match the actual consensus much better now. --kingboyk 17:44, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

• RamMan, if we scaled the current situation at BAG, we would have a group of people at RfA confirming consensus and having bureaucrats flag. We would have a group of people at AfD confirming consensus and having an admin delete (if needed). We would have a group of people at RfAr confirming the need of a case before it could be opened. And on, and on, and on. This is a bureaucratic nightmare. Just because it occurs only in BAG doesn't make it any less insidious.
• I stand corrected on the voting into BAG aspect. Nevertheless, the point remains.
• The notion that you must have technical expertise in order to determine consensus is, frankly, fatally flawed.
• If you can not see that adding a voting system to get people into a position to determine consensus so that another body that has already been tasked with determining consensus elsewhere isn't adding bureaucracy, and you think that by adding such a step you're reducing bureaucracy...I don't think we have a middle ground to agree on.
• I'll note once again, the insistence on this argument that there's a ton of work that would be tasked upon the bureaucrats is flawed. There's very little work involved here.
  • I'll note again: you made the argument that there is very little work, based entirely on a count of bot flaggings. That's not all the work, and your argument is flawed. Gimmetrow 17:41, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
    • Perhaps I wasn't clear. In noting the logs, I am noting the number of cases, and that is all. Determining consensus in those cases is, mostly, not difficult. There might be 10% that require more work than minimal investigation, assuming others commenting have reviewed technical aspects, etc. Thus, the amount of work per month is quite minimal. --Durin 17:51, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
• What I could see as an alternative; a group (open to all who want to be on it) of clerks who assist in determining if a bot proposal meets XYZ requirements prior to closure by a bureaucrat. --Durin 17:26, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

What exactly is the objection? It seems you're complaining about the distribution of power, not about the job that is done. Your clerking suggestion is just extra needless bureacracy. The current system works just fine doesn't it? --kingboyk 17:30, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

The Bureaucrat's page has referred to BAG for as long as it's had a section on how to flag a bot. That would suggest they are happy with the current delegated system. Things were perhaps a little different when there was a 'crat among the BAG members. Gimmetrow 17:39, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

Let me answer what I think is your overall point. I think you don't understand the job that a BAG member goes through when determining consensus or why it requires technical expertise (it is a combination of the two). When a discussion as gone through to completion, in order to determine consensus, it's not just a matter of reading all the comments. One often has to look at the specific bot edits (which can take a while) and sometimes look at other discussions such as WikiProjects discussing the bot. It's isn't a simple matter of tallying votes. If someone, like a bureaucrat, wanted to determine consensus, they might as well be totally involved in the process because they have to understand it intimately. Technical expertise comes into play when determining consensus, because a bot may appear to be good to everyone involved, but errors are often discovered during the consensus determination. I've been there, done that. It happens a lot. Remove the technical aspect, and you be guaranteed to introduce more error. -- RM 17:42, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

• I am in no way disputing that technical aspects of a bot must be reviewed prior to approval. I am disputing that you must have an exclusionary group blessed with technical abilities to determine this. A voluntary clerk corps can do this just as well, without having the needless bureaucracy of elections to BAG, along with the associated badge wearing that 1/3rd of your members are doing. --Durin 17:47, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

• (ec)Have you not paid attention to the comments at the MfD? It is clear that many people require that a specialized group do this. As it stands they are all volunteers who have to undergo community scrutiny. There was a time when any admin could perform an approval. That's similar to the system that you are describing. It became BAG because of the reasons I stated: having a group of technical experts lowered the error rate. An arbitrary volunteer group will make more mistakes, and it is those mistakes that the community has spoken against. -- RM 17:54, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

• You know what's more dangerous? Having random people edit our most precious resource; mainspace. The horror. --Durin 17:59, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

• (EC) None of these steps require any particular technical ability (checking the bot edits? I don't think so), so I don't see the need for a group that is exclusively made of bot programmers. Under the new proposal, everyone can perform these steps. Clerks or otherwise. Tizio 17:49, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

• Well obviously I can't list the technical skills because they differ from bot to bot. My example was mostly the consensus building process. By technical I don't mean how the bot is coded. I mean issues of policy. Is the bot running the appropriate number of edits per minute? Is it violating any other aspect of bot policy? How about the various other policies? Someone has to know that a welcomebot is unacceptable. You can't expect that from an unelected group of volunteers. I'm sorry, but without getting into specific examples, I can't be more detailed than that. When determining consensus, there is an important distinction between whether or not everyone thinks that it is a good idea (they might) and whether or not it violates policy or commits any technical errors. A bureaucrat is not going to do the latter, so they have to wait until an expert verifies that the technical concerns are met. Those experts are BAG. -- RM 18:01, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

• My objection is that there is an exclusionary group that has created a little fiefdom. People are not welcome to be in BAG if they do not have technical expertise. This is precisely the sort of problem I am talking about. That the community can contribute to the discussion does not in any obviate the fact that this group has created a situation that is untenable.
• I ran into very similar sorts of objections when I sought to end clerks as an exclusionary body at WP:CHU and WP:RFCU. I was told there too, that "this has worked for a long time", etc. etc. etc. The arguments are amazingly similar. Clerks are now no longer exclusionary at WP:CHU and WP:RFCU; it's open to everyone. Amazingly, the system hasn't collapsed. This notion that we must create exclusionary groups of people in order to continue the effective functioning of the project is fatally flawed. I am not at all surprised at the strong opposition to this reform. To me, the strong opposition goes some distance to proving how insidious this thinking is. --Durin 17:45, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
  • Ah, a meritocracy. What a terrible thing. Geez, the power involved is minimal, and the BAG does a good job. If you want to change it simply because you don't like to see some folks have some modest power then you're seeking to disrupt Wikipedia for the sake of it. --kingboyk 17:52, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
    • • If asking that the project adhere to its five pillars constitutes disruption, I strongly, adamantly suggest you get me banned from the project because I fully intend on focusing on the goals of the project. --Durin 18:02, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
      • Kingboyk, you're making the claim I am disrupting Wikipedia by having a discussion. I could just as easily conclude that you are disrupting Wikipedia by trying to stop me from contributing to a discussion by threatening me with a WP:POINT violation. I can't believe this. There's nothing wrong with having a discussion. --Durin 18:29, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
        • No, the point he is making is similar to one I made below: your reasons for opposing BAG are purely theoretical. In practice the problems you suggest do not occur. So in essence, you are disrupting a process that is operating without problems. In other words, process change for the sake of process change. I feel that this is a waste of time, but I won't turn down your right to discuss it. -- RM 18:50, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
    • By this logic, we could grant people exclusive editorial decisions on specific articles based on their history of edit to them. That would be a meritocracy as well. Tizio 18:01, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
      • Indeed. Since I have extensive knowledge of fair use and its application to Wikipedia, I should create a board that has privilege of approving fair use images on Wikipedia. Elections will begin next week. --Durin 18:03, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
        • The difference of course is that your position is not based on community consensus. BAG is. You choose to ignore this. -- RM 18:09, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
          • The difference is that I choose to ignore that adding bureaucracy reduces bureaucracy. --Durin 18:12, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
          • Actually, trying to establishing whether BAG has consensus is what we are trying to do now. Tizio 18:16, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
            • See my comment below, since need to split the discussion. BAG does have consensus. The MfD was "Keep", it has been operating for a long time, and ArbCom has (or is going to) confirmed it. The discussion is intended to verify that. The only point about bureaucracy is that making a bureaucrat do it instead of BAG adds bureaucracy by slowing down the process. I am making no other point, other than to say that the current process is efficient because it combines steps. -- RM 18:33, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
  • The bureaucrat position is a meritocracy as is adminship. Both require certain "good deeds" for their associated priveledges. This argument is a red herring and not helpful. -- RM 18:08, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
    • This is a false analogy. Bureaucrats establish consesus on RfA, and are supposed to do it here. This is different from taking an unilateral decision. This is why our WP:CSD (cases when administrator can take unilateral decisions) only covers obvious cases. Tizio 18:11, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
      • You're wrong about bureaucrats, either way. If they are supposed to do it here and they actually do, they just do so without comment and the system isn't broken and doesn't need to change. If they do not do it, then they have implicitly stated that they don't see the need. Also, admins and BAG members do not make unilateral decisions, they determine consensus. My analogy is fine, however the idea that only bureaucrats can determine consensus is nonsense. -- RM 18:17, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
        • • Admins and BAG members can speedy delete articles and can take decisions on bot approvals, respectively, without seeking consensus. If the BAG only establish consensus, then this job can be placed on administrators; there would be no need for a separate group. The proposal is about bureaucrats just because they are the most trusted members of the community and they can do the job. Tizio 18:22, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
            • Your comment is answered by my comment below. -- RM 18:30, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

BAG responsibilities

We can continue the discussion above, but I need to clarify some points that are confusing. BAG is responsible for two things:

1. Technical Oversight - I've said it many times, but this has been required for years. BAG was developed when the current admin oversight wasn't working out. The community has determined this to be fine. The most recent ArbCom case with Betacommand has confirmed that there is community consensus for BAG. I'm not making it up.
2. Determination of Consensus - This is the only aspect of BAG responsibility that could be questioned because it's never been explicitly stated anywhere. However, if you see my point above, either bureaucrats are already determining consensus when they perform flagging or they don't see the need for it. In either case, what BAG does is fine and there have been no complaints. WP:Consensus does not require that a bureaucrat determine consensus, so why should they for this process? I could understand the reasoning behind a potential reform that put consensus determination into the hands of admins, but I'm not sure that it would pass a community "vote". Admins are not appointed because they are trusted in consensus determinations. There are other issues not listed here. It could be attempted though.

Perhaps we can discuss each issue individually? -- RM 18:24, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

• "what BAG does is fine and there have been no complaints. ". I'm complaining (and there have been other complaints as well). WP:Consensus doesn't require that a specially elected board approve consensus either, so why should there be this process? --Durin 18:31, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
• I don't mean theoretical complaints. I mean actual complaints based on something that a BAG member did incorrectly in either of the above tasks. As far as I know, it has not happened. You are complaining about a process that works fine in practice. Your question is important. Why should there be this process? I tried to state it in a short form, but clearly that was not sufficient. Allow me time to formulate a response. -- RM 18:38, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
  • Time granted, but be aware that there have been complaints. It think it's incorrect to say there's not been complaints. --Durin 18:52, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
    • I want to take time to form a reasonable argument defense of BAG, but we can still discuss the other aspects. Could you please post links to any specific complaints? -- RM 18:53, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
      • I'd rather engage in a discussion of the best solution. Right now, the discussion is +X vs. -X. It's contentious, and rancorous. Not much point to it. --Durin 18:58, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
        • Let me clarify my request with a question: Are the other complaints based on theory or actual practice? I understand that there are a number (at least 6 from the MfD alone) that are based on theoretical complaints. No one will dispute that and I don't need you to find links for that. What I'm interested in is complaints about actual practice, if they exist, because they may help. You have to understand the problem before a solution can be found. You can't solve a problem you don't understand. -- RM 19:14, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
          • Let me clarify; assume the complaints are legitimate or false. It doesn't matter. I'd like step back from this and work abstractly. Focus on the goals of the project. What are we intending to do here? What model best serves these purposes while holding to the pillars of Wikipedia? A process has been put in place without this sort of thought process that a number of people in the community have raised complaints about, theoretical and practical. So, assume for the moment, that BAG doesn't exist. Identify what the need is, and begin from there. I know some people aren't going to be willing to take this step even though it's an intellectual step, and not a functional one; read much of the above; it devolves to "What? No BAG? You're insane!" If it makes it easier, I am indeed insane :) --Durin 19:23, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
            • You are correct: All this bickering is counterproductive. The philosophical underpinnings of bot process are important and should be considered. I'll try to respond to this point as well with a more detailed response (within an hour or two if possible). -- RM 20:48, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

I'm going to try to answer the question of "why should there be this process?" as opposed to some other. I maintain that technical oversight of some form is required and that BAG satisfies that to the community's desires. My response is based on that assumption. I'm going to address the function of consensus determination, as it applies to BAG and ask "why we can or can't just have the admins do that". The reason is actually pretty simple. Before consensus can be determined, a bot has to have the stamp of approval from a BAG member. Why? Because a bot can't be approved unless its technical oversight has approved it. BAG serves a useful function by eliminating the need for an extra bureaucratic step by performing both the technical approval and the consensus determination in a single step. Theoretically anyone in the community could determine consensus, but there is no opportunity, that is, no need. Now, the only change that could be made would be to allow an admin to mark a discussion as approved pending review by a BAG member, but I don't see any advantage to this step. In order for it to work, you'd have to change the informal structure that we have now and introduce a time component: after x amount of time, someone can close the discussion pending BAG approval. Perhaps you could get away with not doing it, but again, I don't see its purpose. As has been stated elsewhere, these specific tasks represent a minor portion of the approvals process. The inherent problem here is that BAG is required to give the stamp of approval, and as a result it bottlenecks at that point. The bureaucracy is limited to a single point, but it still exists. I'll address some of the other points above later. -- RM 23:05, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

My observations:

1. ArbCom does not set policy; it is not expected to do it, and its members stated they won't set policy; ArbCom enforces policy; so, if policy (written or otherwise) says that "bots need BAG approvals", they will take decisions accordingly;
2. technical oversight: can you show me a request that has been denied over technical grounds only? I believe that most requests are rather denied based on their presumed effects, that is, assuming that the bot works as declared;
3. the bot policy says: "Please do not start running your bot without... 3. Getting the go-ahead from someone in the approvals group"; to me, this is saying that BAG have authority, that they take the final decision. Saying that everyone can comment on a bot proposal and that BAG members can take these comments into account is quite different from saying that decision is based on consensus.

Regarding your recent addition to policy, I don't think there is consensus on this either. There has been no consensus within the ArbCom for this (Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Betacommand/Proposed decision#Admin bots), let alone in the community at large (ArbCom works by voting, not by consensus). Tizio 15:03, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

A quick note. I think that all ArbCom does is confirm what has already been determined, rather than create new policy. I have seen numerous instances where ArbCom decisions have been used during arguments as reasons for or against some position. In the case of admin bots, I've been arguing the position for quite some time, and ArbCom confirmed what I believed to be community consensus. However, for the avoidance of doubt, I've reverted my change. Disagrements don't mean there is not consensus, but some discussion can't hurt before it is added or not. -- RM 03:55, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

Category.py

When using the add action of Category.py is there a way of getting the categories to be added to the end of the articles rather then at the top? /Lokal_Profil 21:51, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

It doesn't always happen but sometimes it ends up on top. /Lokal_Profil 23:13, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

Looking for bot operator to help with template replacement

Hi. I hope this is the right location for such a query. I am looking for a bot operator who can help me replace over 400 {{WikiProject Palestine}} with the new {{WikiProject Palestine}}. It is a simple search and replace that is limited to the set of pages that link directly to Wikipedia:WikiProject_Palestine, for example this list of pages. Is this something that a bot operator can help me with? If anyone can help and has the time to help, please reply on Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Palestine. Thanks for your time. --70.51.232.124 20:22, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

Ah I am adding this to Wikipedia:Bot requests. See further discussion there. --70.51.232.124 20:45, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

Children of Curpsbot

Please see Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents#Children_of_Curpsbot regarding the secret use of adminbots. Dragons flight 06:42, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

At the above thread, Misza13 (talk · contribs · blocks · protections · deletions · page moves · rights · RfA) has been noted as running an adminbot (probably the most active presently operating one actually). So, ignore it, accept it, denigrate it, celebrate it, whatever. Dragons flight 16:33, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

Read-Only

Hey, What are the policies on Read Only bots? I don't remember reading anything on them, and i'm curious based on some of the bots using the automated spam sources outside wikipedia. Thanks! TheFearow 04:11, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

Honestly, it would be better to use a database dump. --AllyUnion (talk) 09:27, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

Is 80.168.225.159 an annon bot?

80.168.225.159 is making an average of 2.7 edits per minute (edit counter)(Contributions). All the edits are all {{coor title dm}} templates being added to articles. I cant tell if this is a bot running annon or a user who has been making similar edits for 2 and a half hours with no edits before today. If this is a bot, what would one do? Thanks, Urdna 15:50, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Does this need approval?

If the only edit a bot makes is to its own user pages/pages does it still need approval? My example being a bot which lists all of the dead links on a page and then whacks them into a table on its user page for its operator to fix. There's no explicit policy on this as far as I can tell. It makes at least one edit without human interaction - but surely one edit to a page few are likley to see can't count as a server hog? PeteMarsh 14:55, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Question about exclusion from this policy

According to User:Gracenotes who is currently running for admin, he is allowed to use his robotic script with no need for a special account or Talk page. He seems to be generating hundreds of simple robotic edits per hour, for many hours, all from a regular human account. Is this all acceptable, as he says (see A7), according to WP:BOT? Crum375 19:55, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

If he is indeed manually approving each edit then it is not really a bot, but an automated helper tool. I have used similar tools to get past some backlogs. ^(H) 19:58, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Do you think it is sensible to assume that someone would sit for 5 hours non-stop and press a button over a thousand times, many times per minute, and be able to 'approve' each edit? Crum375 21:02, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Can i create?

Can i create a manually assisted bot which uses AWB. It would do small tasks round my pages and some others? Thanks ACBestMy ContributionsAutograph Book 08:36, 31 May 2007 (UTC) PLEASE LEAVE REPLIES TO THIS ON MY TALK PAGE AT User talk:ACBest. THANKS!

Bots and content disputes

An automated script run by a user has caused a lot of disagreement (see here and here). The issue was discussed at WP:AN/I, but did not result in any action. (See Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive251#Bot delinking dates)

I would like to propose the following guideline for discussion:

“ Automated processes should only be used for edits everyone can agree on. They should not be used in cases where there is a content dispute. ”

-- Petri Krohn 20:35, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

Self limiting bots

Probably everybody and their neighbor already know. But pywikipedia bots are now selflimiting:

Changing page [[en:Curt Schilling]]
# Pausing 5 seconds due to excessive server lag.
Changing page [[en:Curt Schilling]]
Changing page [[en:Dale Murphy]]
Changing page [[en:Danny Graves]]
# Pausing 5 seconds due to excessive server lag.
Changing page [[en:Danny Graves]]
# Pausing 5 seconds due to excessive server lag.
Changing page [[en:Danny Graves]]
# Pausing 5 seconds due to excessive server lag.
Changing page [[en:Danny Graves]]
# Pausing 5 seconds due to excessive server lag.
Changing page [[en:Danny Graves]]
# Pausing 5 seconds due to excessive server lag.
Changing page [[en:Danny Graves]]
# Pausing 5 seconds due to excessive server lag.
Changing page [[en:Danny Graves]]
# Pausing 5 seconds due to excessive server lag.
Changing page [[en:Danny Graves]]
# Pausing 5 seconds due to excessive server lag.
Changing page [[en:Danny Graves]]
# Pausing 5 seconds due to excessive server lag.
Changing page [[en:Danny Graves]]
Changing page [[en:Dick Groat]]
Changing page [[en:Don Kessinger]]

and that's even specifying -putthrottle argument. So, the old chant about "bots at high speed will destroy the server" is now, at least for pywikipedia based bots, invalid, as the server itself throttles the bot when there's a heavy load. -- drini ^[meta:] _[commons:] 18:39, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

For the sake of full transparency, maxlag = None in user-config.py disables this behavior and reverts to internal throttle. This may be useful in cases when the bot simply must do several consecutive edits at a quick rate, ignoring the lag. Миша13 21:52, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

BetacommandBot

User:BetacommandBot is getting a lot of complaints, but the owner is not responding. --Apoc2400 10:38, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

He has been responding to complaints. What specific complaint do you think is going unanswered? ^(H) 15:48, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

This bot is disrupting the general community and has been documented to tag images WITH a fair use provided. There is growing consensus that this bot should be shut down. Permanently. (Mind meal 10:29, 6 June 2007 (UTC))

wrong. please give examples of where you think the bot is wrong and ill show you were you made your mistake. Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)} 15:15, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

This bot seems to be out of control with falsely adding perfectly fine images non fair-use speedy deletion tags. カラム 06:04, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Agreed, please see their talk page at User talk:BetacommandBot. (Mind meal 10:25, 6 June 2007 (UTC))

BetacommandBot seems to be out of control, altering huge swaths of pages (whitespace edits, perhaps?). This has been brought up on its talk-page, but its owner hasn't replied yet; until (s)he fixes it, I think the bot should probably be temporarily blocked. —Ruakh_TALK 20:25, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

Indeed. Supposedly it's been fixed. Remember that for most bots (including BetacommandBot) any user can stop it by leaving a message on its talk page. See also below. —Steve Summit (talk) 23:53, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

Fixed? That is quite humorous. Please see their talk page: User talk:BetacommandBot. (Mind meal 10:26, 6 June 2007 (UTC))

Tagged a public domain image BetacommandBot has tagged 100+ talk pages using an image (Image:Coast guard flag.gif) with a Public Domain template. Although the specific PD template used on the image at the time was obsolete, it was nonetheless an assertion that the image was in the public domain, an assertion easily confirmed. Yet the Bot confusingly and incorrectly tagged all articles using the image as needing a fair use justification, when all it needed was a slightly different PD template change. Betacommand asserts nothing was wrong with this, while I disagree. Further, I feel it would be consist ant with WP:B for Betacommand to repair the damage and remove all the 'fair use rationale required' templates from all the articles using Image:Coast guard flag.gif. Thank you. --Pesco 23:45, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

What needs to be approved.

Greetings. I run User:polbot, which has a bot flag and has been approved for 2 different functions. I'm working on code that will collect information from a few hundred different pages and summarize that in a textfile on my computer. I will then paste the contents of that textfile into a subpage of my userpage. Does this sort of process require bot approval, or can I just run it without getting authorization? – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 18:14, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

This sounds perfectly fine with me, but making the edit manually is a good idea (mostly to make sure that people won't yell at you). I gather about pages (using the API, usually) all the time for various tasks; the point of a bot flag is to hide and mark edits in recent changes, and more recently, to gain greater access to the API. The first doesn't apply, and the second is trivial because you're an admin anyway (and thus have that access). Of course, using maxlag (for all index.php queries) can't hurt, and maybe some throttling. Although, IANABAGM™. Gracenotes^T § 14:47, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

Large data-gathering request

I recently made a request at Wikipedia:Bot requests#Gathering data on DEFAULTSORT, listas and Category pipe-sorting in biographical articles, and was told that here might be a better place to ask. Any advice would be greatly appreciated, either here or there. I think the original place was the right place to ask, but I was told to ask here, so I am doing so! :-) Carcharoth 01:50, 14 June 2007 (UTC)

OsamaKBOT

Hello, I would just like to say first that I am not "reporting", this bot as such, merely asking some questions, as I may also like to create a bot in the future. If you look at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/OsamaKBOT it says it's an interwiki bot, yet its contributions are to fix double redirects, see also this. I was wondering :

• Is it encouraged for a user to fix double redirects ?
• Can a bot start doing something it was not approved for initially
• If a bot's approved scope of work is expanded, where can I see the new authorisation ?
• Is OsamaK running a bot on his normal user account also ? If no then would this be allowed?

Thanks if anyone can answer these questions, and sorry if maybe I should have asked about this at the help desk. Jackaranga 08:04, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

Here's my understanding. I'm sure I'll be corrected if I'm wrong.

• Double redirects are generally speedily approved. If you're asking if users are allowed to work on them in addition to bots, sure! It's just easier for bots, and users are not allowed to edit at bot-like speeds.
• A bot can start doing something it was not approved for initially, if a new task request is made and approved.
• If you want to know for what tasks a bot has been approved, you can look in Category:Wikipedia approved bot requests for all subpages beginning with that bot's name. In this case, OsamaKBOT (talk · contribs) has not been approved to fix double redirects.
• It is possible that OsamaK (talk · contribs) is also running a bot under his normal user account, but he has not requested approval to do so, and the edits are slow enough that use of a semi-automated tool is also plausible. Do you have reason to believe that he's using a bot, or have you seen any problems with his edits? In general, usernames for new bots should incorporate the word "bot" so that editors realize they are not dealing with a human editor.

Anyway, to answer your main question, it does indeed seem like OsamaKBOT (talk · contribs) is performing a task which was not approved by the Bot Approval Group. That may or may not be a problem; now that it's been pointed out, I'd leave any notification or action to their discretion. Thanks! — Madman bum and angel (talk – desk) 12:35, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

Note: OsamaK (talk · contribs) has already been notified that he needs to create another BRFA, and it seems he has declined to do so. — Madman bum and angel (talk – desk) 12:39, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

Ok thanks for the answers, I have no problem with any of the edits of the bot or user, I was just trying to understand. Jackaranga 13:25, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

hourly/daily/weekly maintenance bots

There seem to be an increasing number of individually created and maintained bots now that run with hourly, daily, or weekly periodicity. It seems to me that the more we do this, the more we rely on the continued good will of the users who run these bots. I started a (never completed) list of periodic maintenance activities various folks run nearly a year ago, at Wikipedia:Maintenance/tasklist. This whole approach strikes me as tremendously ad hoc. I think a better approach might be to put hourly, daily, and weekly bot tasks on a protected page someplace, to be run be a centralized bot. The centralized bot could either be run by some volunteer, or on toolserver (by anyone with a toolserver account - assuming you can run at jobs on toolserver), or on some other wikimedia server assuming we could convince the development team this is a good idea. Anyone think this might be worth pursuing? -- Rick Block (talk) 02:06, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

Surely someone would care to comment on this. -- Rick Block (talk) 04:24, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

The thing is diversity helps us, A single bot could not keep up with the tasks. we might be able to create a pool of code that users could add to. But a design team would seem to make it harder. there are bot ops that use pywiki that is centralized. (most bots are based off this framework). Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)} 04:32, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

• On the other hand, I really like this idea. – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 11:43, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

• • I do think that we should have a pool of code that we can all work from.(agree the basic idea is good) and add to/modify. It should be an informal design team. Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)}

• • • I'd like to be on this, but I work with Perl on a Windows platform, so I don't guess there are too many who I would be coordinating with. :-) – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 17:53, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

• • • • I work with PHP both on Windows and on Linux; I think there may be room for every major language.  :) — Madman bum and angel (talk – desk) 19:25, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

Backing up a bit, my idea is to have a jointly managed tasklist (meaning actual executable scripts, not just descriptions), on one or more pages so that

a) the tasks are visible to anyone who might care to look into them

b) if someone decides to stop running their bot, the tasks don't have to be reimplemented by someone else

I'm not sure any of the existing bot frameworks are exactly suitable for this. I've recently started running a pywikipedia bot but created my own custom version of replace.py that replaces an entire file with an input file so I could connect a bunch of previously written shell/awk scripts to it. I think for this to work, the control file for the bot would have to be highly scriptable perhaps more like at a shell level than perl (or python or whatever). Maybe the simplest way to explain this would be for me to set up an example. I run a daily job now. I'll put the shell script I use in a (protected) file someplace and have my "bot" retrieve it and execute it. -- Rick Block (talk) 19:29, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

Hello! Yes, I still live... just work has buried me, and I've crawled out of my hole to post for a bit. I think this is a great idea, and I'd be willing to assist. I had a few ideas but I don't know whether they'd work now... A generic bot for this purpose that one could subclass from would be useful. --AllyUnion (talk) 07:43, 21 June 2007 (UTC)

HagermanBot

Does a sysop or an admin or even an editor know if the functionality of HagermanBot is going to be supported or is HagermanBot going to be fixed? I am under the impression it is no longer running. It was very useful. Thanks! --akc9000 ^{(talk • contribs • count)} 12:46, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

It's unknown when or even if HagermanBot will be back. Attempts have been made to contact Hagerman by email and OverlordQ is currently working on a replacement. --S ^up? 13:16, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

Unflagged bots

Hey everyone, I noticed a bot running without a flag, which seems to be violating WP:OWN by constantly reverting a users page to their preferred version. See the following:

• (BRFA
• Approved BRFAs
• talk
• contribs
• count
• SUL
• logs
• page moves
• block log
• rights log
• flag)

I know this is against policy, both bot policy (no approval) and that of WP:OWN

Thanks! Matt/TheFearow (Talk) (Contribs) (Bot) 01:46, 5 July 2007 (UTC)

Oops, it was blocked, but not showing up for me. Sorry for wasting time! Matt/TheFearow (Talk) (Contribs) (Bot) 01:50, 5 July 2007 (UTC)

"Repairing damage" section

I have added "There is, of course, no reason that help cannot be asked for or offered." to this. While we all feel responsibility for our bots, the bottom line is responsibility for the encyclopedia. I would certainly wish to help out a bot owner in difficulties, rather than just say "your problem - you fix it". Rich Farmbrough 13:28, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Source code

When the source code for a bot is made, and published on Meta-Wiki, and the bot listed at approval requests, do you need to submit the source code in someway, or is there nothing left to do? Cool Blue^{talk to me} 22:18, 5 July 2007 (UTC)

No, you don't have to submit it anywhere. Publishing it on meta is just fine. – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 14:38, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

Bots editing User pages

I don't see anything on this policy page about bots' behavior regarding User pages. Twice this month bots have added interwiki links to my User page here at en:, to link it to my user pages at other wikis (i.e., in other languages). Thing is, I don't want my User page linked to any other wikis; if I did, I would have done it myself. I think this policy page should at least mention that many users don't want their user pages changed by others, and especially not by bots. I don't expect an all-out ban on bot-editing of User pages, but I think it should be discouraged. - dcljr (talk) 02:52, 21 June 2007 (UTC)

BTW, I see there's Template:Bots, but apparently only a small number of bots honor it. - dcljr (talk) 03:09, 21 June 2007 (UTC)

You could try leaving a message on the bot-runner's talk page, letting them know about Template:Bots and that you didn't want your page updated. They might be convinced to exclude user pages. (As an aside, I would personally support a rule that bots be required to be exclusion-compliant if they alter user pages.) – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 14:24, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

Infobox Bot

I made this infobox - Template:Infobox Bot, obviously for bots. What does everybody think of it? I myself think its pretty useful. Anonymous Dissident^Talk 06:22, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

I really like it! I also like that I could have separate ones for each bot function of the same bot. A few suggestions:

1. Changing "screenshot" to "image" would be safer. If a bot runs on a non-free OS, then we can't use a screenshot on a userpage (since fair-use images can't be used outside of article space). Besides, your example doesn't use a screenshot here.
2. An optional source code link would be good to have
3. A link to the bot authorization
4. An optional "other info" parameter would be very useful. See {{Non-free media rationale}} for an example. My bot, for instance, would link to its resource page from here.
5. A parameter of "exclusion_compliant" would be good. If it's not "yes", it wouldn't do anything, but if "yes" it should note what exclusion compliant means and add Category:Exclusion compliant bots.
6. It might also be nice to have optional parameters for programming languages that would add categories. For example, the optional "uses_Perlwikipedia = yes" could add Category:Perlwikipedia bots and link to the Perlwikipedia page. Same with Pywikipedia, AWB, etc. {{WPBiography}} does something like this.

Thanks for making this! – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 12:45, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

P.S. I'm using this here. – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 14:37, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

• Thanks for the kind words. I have made some updates to the template, and hope to be making more soon. Personally, I was surprised to find that there was not already an "Infobox bot", but there you go. Thanks again for your comments. -- Anonymous Dissident^Talk 07:50, 7 July 2007 (UTC)

I added "author" and "shutoff" as parameters. Sebi _[talk] 07:53, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

Rampant User:BetacommandBot

I'm not sure if this is the right place to put it, but First, I should stat that I now fully understand the intent of BetacommandBot. I'm not arguing its intent. I'm making claims against it's implementation. The burden of proof section states that the bot must be harmless. I would argue that in many cases, it is doing harm. I specifically reference: [2] I have attempted to contact the creator of the bot, but he insists that there's nothing wrong. He says that I should just subst my templates rather than transclude them, but that eliminates most of the point of the template. He has even suggested that some changes be made to the template in order to bring it in compliance with policy. Existence as a transcluded template facilitates easier change. Also, I shouldn't have to change my behaviors because of a bot. Wouldn't that be a "harm"? What, if anything, should be done? McKay 16:32, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

I don't think a bot should add this deletion notice to images that have rationales, but that don't use the template. – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 16:45, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

I guess {{Non-free media rationale}} is the template you are referring to. If this is the case, Wikipedia:Fair use rationale guideline states that {{Non-free media rationale}} is meant to facilitate the compilation of a FU rationale, but is not obligatory. The following section even mention a possible way of providing a rationale without using the template. As far as I can see, the bot is making a mistake in this case. Tizio 17:06, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

So, what should be done about the bot then? Also, I first noticed the aforementioned template only a few days ago. WP:NONFREE doesn't reference it. It merely says to provide the rationale. McKay 18:10, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

I left a message on the bot's talk page. – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 19:23, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

The template is mostly discussed at WP:FURG. When we were putting that together I don't think it was ever anyone's intention that people would be required to use the template, it was only created to help people if they wanted. I'm sure it's just an oversight though :) - cohesion 00:53, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

It looks to me like {{Non-free media rationale}} is for helping to create an explanation for an image. Because this is a notice from the contributor of the image, the phrasing should NOT later be changed by template changes. So the template should be subst: to make the text permanent (in addition to whatever changes the contributor makes to the resulting sample). (SEWilco 02:58, 21 July 2007 (UTC))

The reason that this "template" is ignored is for a good reason, its used on a very few number of images (14). {{non-free media rationale}} does the same thing and has a wider use. Also this encourages everyone and their kid brother to create "rationale templates" in their userspace and if this trend continues we will shortly have 100 "templates" in userspace that will make a mess of trying to enforce policy and prevent automated detection of images. (everyone will be complaining that the bot ignores their rationales) As figuring out what are rationale templates and what are licensing templates is not a very simple method. The current practice is to ignore images with the standard rationale template. Not only does this make standardization better but it also makes figuring out valid rationales easier. ^∆ 06:43, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

Oh I misundersood, I was thinking you were using a manual rationale. We shouldn't have templated non substituted rationales. Obviously this would create an unmanageable situation very quickly. If betacommandbot recognizes {{Non-free media rationale}} that's fine I guess, but I think all rationales should be substituted. Transcluded data is difficult to see from many views for bots and in database dumps. For example, when the image dump is done how will people see your rationale? If you use a transcluded standard rationale template they won't. - cohesion 20:18, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

HTML

I am considering getting a bot, but haven't filed my request yet. Can a bot be programmed in Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML? Also, what is a botnet and what does the Wikipedia Community think of them? I noticed Bonaparte was banned for "malicious sockpuppetry and running a botnet". ionas68224|talk|contribs|email 10:07, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

HTML is a markup language for creating web pages. It's not a programming or scripting language, so making a bot using HTML doesn't make sense. Many bots may have an HTML output though, for example a bot might create a page for people to monitor something. For more information on botnets see Botnet. - cohesion 20:22, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

You may also want to read WP:CREATEBOT. Having said that, we kind of do things the other way around here: since a bot is supposed to serve a specific purpose, usually it's a good idea to figure out the 'why' before the 'how'. --S ^up? 20:38, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

Since I have no previous programming experience, what is an easier language to begin with? ionas68224|talk|contribs|email 16:27, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

That depends on what you want to do besides writing a bot. If you're interested in OOP, well, Java isn't bad for beginners and a good way to avoid a few major headaches you'd run into if you were to start with C. If you want to start small, try Javascript or really any script language (JavaScript would be my first choice in, that case, since you already have everything you need). If you're mostly interested in bots, Python isn't bad at all. Contrary to what you may have read here, real men use C or Perl though. ;) S ^up? 17:09, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

PHP is also rather easy for beginners, though it doesn't have an established bot framework like Python does. — Madman bum and angel (talk – desk) 21:38, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

Auto-revert

Auto-revert (talk · contribs)

I don't know if this actually is a bot or not, the page claims that it is an "Automated service to revert vandalism". Is reverting all edits made by user Nate1481, when they aren't vandalism. Several complaints left on talk page, seems to be malicious. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Thedarxide (talk • contribs) 08:53, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

This has been dealt with, by the way. – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 15:29, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

"Feasibility Studies"

Perhaps this already exists and I'm just blind, but is there a way to get an idea of the likelihood of a bot being approved in principle before going ahead and actually writing the bot? It's my understanding that Requests for approval should only be used after the bot is written--which may result in a lot of wasted work if the request is ultimately denied. So if there isn't already, perhaps there should be a place where someone can seek input on whether or not a bot for a certain purpose is acceptable in principle before he goes ahead and writes the bot and tries to get his particular implementation accepted. Kurt Weber 02:15, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

Why not post on WT:BRFA, since it'd be a prelude of sorts to the BRFA, and the same people who watch BRFAs watch the talk page. — Madman bum and angel (talk – desk) 02:42, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

Interwiki bots rearranging interwiki links

I am watching some pages with a huge number of interwiki links, like Amsterdam and Netherlands. Every time one of the interwiki bots adds an interwiki link, it seems to randomly rearrange some of the links. Sometimes into alphabetical order, sometimes breaking the existing right order. For example: diff 1 (misplacing pam) diff 2 (misplacing be-x-old and lt). Also note this diff, where a bot makes an edit only rearranging interwiki links.

My proposal would be the following:

• Do not allow bots make edits rearranging interwiki links, as it is utterly useless and they cannot do it right.

Another problem with these bots making errors is that the authors can often only be contacted off the en wiki.

--User:Krator (t c) 14:04, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

have you talked to the bot operator? you might ask when they last updated their pywiki code. older version of it may be causing those problems. β^_command 14:11, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

Contacting the bot owners of the three examples above would require me to register at the Italian, Danish and Russian Wikipedia. I'd rather edit articles than spend my time hopping around languages I don't speak. --User:Krator (t c) 14:48, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

Not really have you tried Special:emailuser for the operator of the bot? β^_command 14:50, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

Actually, the bot was doing it right. Please read m:Interwiki sorting order#By order of alphabet, based on local language. — madman bum and angel 16:09, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

Request for opinions

Greetings. Polbot is an approved bot that reads information from the IUCN and creates new stubs on plant and animal species. There is currently a request for opinions here regarding the linking of biologists' names. Any comments on that page would be welcome. – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 17:21, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

OrphanBot tagging issues

I uploaded Image:Second Ave Subway CGI station.jpg today with a rationale during its intial upload. Half an hour later, OrphanBot tagged the image as not having a rationale, despite it had one. An hour later, the bot tagged the same image a second time, leaving two identical tags on the page. I removed the tags and send Carnildo (bot's operator) a message about the issue. Then less than half an hour later, the bot tags the image for a third time, and I'm pretty sure it will do it again. If the bot has tagged my image incorrectly three times, I'm sure it has also done so to other images as well. –Dream out loud (talk) 00:29, 13 August 2007 (UTC)

In response to the message I left on Carnildo's talk page, Carnildo simply said, "I do wish people would stop coming up with new names for old templates." The statement is completely irrelevant, and it bothers me that the user does not seem to have any concern whatsoever about the issue. –Dream out loud (talk) 17:52, 13 August 2007 (UTC)

Actually, it's a concise summary of what caused the problem and what I did to fix it: someone came up with a new name for the {{fair use rationale}} tag, so OrphanBot didn't see the rationale, and someone else changed the name of the template that the {{nrd}} template inserts, so OrphanBot wasn't aware it had already tagged the image. --Carnildo 19:01, 13 August 2007 (UTC)

Real user working as bot

This page and other related talk about policies regarding bots, not about the technical details abouts bots, so excuse me if I ask a nonsense.

From what I have seen, despite working in other ways, a bot would be, from a strict technical point of view, a user like any other else. User page, user talk page, contributions, logs, etc; all the things a user has, a bot also has. Even more, there are some things of the kind of using a bot as a regular account (like answering to other users) that are not encouraged, but by not being so means they are possible to be done. But then, by logic, the opposite would also apply: if bots and users are technically the same, and a bot can be used as a main user account, then a main user account could be also used as a bot.

I guess that nobody would support an administrator employing bot techniques to tag all articles in a huge category for deletion, or to close a huge number of deletion discussions with a predefined result, or to delete all such articles in a row. But is there a way, other than the stadistic fact of more than 800 edits and 100 deletions in less than 10 hours, to prove that a regular account was being used as a bot?

Note: This topic is not for reporting the actions mentioned. That would be done somewhere else, at it's proper way. This topic is merely for the technical question, about if it's possible to recognize actions done by software or by human checking Perón 19:10, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

I don't know. Making 80 edits per hour, or 10 deletions an hour, is something I do manually all the time. I'm not sure how you'd prove it, since bots interact with Wikipedia the same way people do, usually. Have you tried asking the person? – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 19:35, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

it would just take some looking into it by someone who knows how bots work to check whether or not that the style of editing is human or bot related. dont forget using some simi-automatic scripts you can edit fairly rapidly. Ive clocked myself at over 120 edits an hour with some of my tools. β^_command 21:11, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

Regular accounts (without bot flag) can use scripts with manual approval of all edits, as long as the account doesn't edit "too fast", the edits have consensus, and the user stops and responds if another user questions the edits. "Too fast" in this context is debatable, but given that an "unflagged bot" is limited to 2 edits per minute, up to 120 edits per hour for a script-assisted task doesn't seem unreasonable to me. One sign of script-assisted editing is repetitive, identical or patterned edit summaries. Gimmetrow 22:20, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

Definition of Bot

I am aware that a bot it an automated program to read and edit wikipedia, but i was wondering if the following counts as a bot: Something that simply reads wikipedia and maintains its own log of issues to be manualy edited or if the bot is simply after statistics.

This wouldnt cause the problem of potentialy dangerous editing but it would download a lot of data from th server and i wondered whether wikipedia objects to such programs? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 3.14 etc (talk • contribs) 23:29, August 22, 2007 (UTC).

Yes. — madman bum and angel 00:10, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

“ Bots that download substantial portions of the page database are prohibited. Instead, download the database dumps. See also Wikipedia:Mirrors and forks. ”

I have 2 queries :

1. is there some threshold for "substantial portions", for example would a script be okay if it only needed to read say 10 pages at a time and was used infrequently, and also was password protected to prevent thousands of users doing it?
2. could one of these bots run if approved by the bot approval guys, if i could justufy the usefulness of the bot, i'm sure that lots of bots must read a considerable about of data and that my idea wouldnt be unique in terms of bandwidth usage? (Pi 15:55, 23 August 2007 (UTC))

You'd have to give us more of an idea than that. 10 pages at a time, but for how long? What kind of throttling or maxlag value is being used? What do you consider a considerable amount of data? Maybe you should file a more detailed BRFA or post more information here. — madman bum and angel 17:35, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

Okay, here is a bit more info:

Bot 1 - I would like to make a PHP script. What this would do is allow me to enter the name of a user and then the script reads the Special:Contributions/User pages ( All pages) and the script calculates brief statistics on their usage including total number of edits, number of new articles started, top 5 most edited articles and so on. I don't think that this qualifies as a bot but may be prohibited under mirror laws.

Bot 2 - This would be run approx once per month i think. It would collect a list of dissambiguation pages from Catagory:disambiguation, at each run it would collect a set number then stop. Then the program would cycle through it's previous list ( stored in a text file) and for each one read the Special:Whatlinkshere page for that page and read the list of articles and store them in a seperate text file.

After it's run i can manualy look at the output file and for each one investigate whether it would be better for the link to be to the correct article ( if there is one) rather than the disambiguation page.

For example there are currently numerous pages with links to the LA disambiguation page and i am sure that a great deal of them should realy be pointed at Los Angeles

I think that this second bot would almost certainly need approval as it would look at enough pages, perhaps 1000 per run, however i don't know if it is a bot as it doesnt edit manualy and it would be close to impossible for it to do so. (Pi 17:54, 23 August 2007 (UTC))

Also, is it prohibited to run a bot simply as a means of testing the bot code, on the condition that the only page edited is the user's own sandbox? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 3.14 etc (talk • contribs) 18:16, August 23, 2007 (UTC).

Bot 1 is pretty much covered by WP:EDITCOUNT/WP:COUNT. There are many, many tools available that do what you want, and most of them are on the Wikimedia toolserver, which provides access to Wikimedia database cluster slaves, which means they put almost no load on the servers.

Bot 2 is pretty much covered by Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links. Those pages are generated by querying the database dump, and since that's already done for you, you can get started right away.

As for approval, BAG members have stated in the past that bots that edit only in their own userspace or in their operator's userspace need not be approved. Anyone more senior than I can feel free to correct me if I'm wrong about that; I know at least Betacommand has indicated such in the past. Keep in mind, however, that all unapproved bots must run at a maximum of two edits per minute and may not edit fully automatically.

Thanks! — madman bum and angel 02:07, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

Bot for adding links

Is there a bot available that can take a newly created template with many links and systematically add the template to the bottom of each article the template links to? The only problem might be getting it to add the template in the right location. Richard001 09:36, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

You may want to add this question to Wikipedia:Bot requests, with more details about what template in particular and where it should be added on the given pages. — madman bum and angel 11:40, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

ImageRemovalBot problem

I have been noticing some trouble with the way ImageRemovalBot handles the deletion of gallery images. Many of the images that ImageRemovalBot removes are music-related. Some of these images are album covers that have been placed in galleries on artist's pages. When ImageRemovalBot removes the image, it also removes the name, record label, release date, and chart information along with the image. In some cases, it has removed several or all albums released by a band. Here are some examples:

• Starsailor's entire discography was missing when I checked their page.
• So was The Velvet Teen's - with no albums listed, this article would then be a candidate for deletion!
• What good is a Replacements discography, if it doesn't even mention their first two albums?
• The Bob Schneider album listing was made into a complete mess.

I had a spirited discussion with the bot's owner, Carnildo, about fixing the problem. I suggested either modifying the bot to change images in galleries to some sort of default "no image" image, or simply stopping removing redlinked images from galleries (better to log them and remove by hand than have the bot removing content along with them).

Carnildo and I do not see eye to eye on the issue, so I am posting here because I think this bot is no longer harmless per WP:BOT. Chubbles 17:39, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

I don't believe there is a perfect solution -- the question is, which option is less bad? Option #1: the bot leaves missing images in galleries (or replaces with "no image"). Option #2, the bot removes them, as it does currently. Both options have pluses and minuses, but I think option #2 is the better option. I'll explain. The only reason to prefer option #1 is that the bot occasionally removes encyclopedic material that isn't anywhere else in the article. That's a legitimate problem, but the counter-arguments are strong: (1) Encyclopedic material shouldn't be only in captions. (2) This problem could apply equally well to thumbnail images, if their captions have material that isn't available elsewhere. It's more common for gallery images, but the if we leave empty images in galleries because the captions might have useful info, wouldn't we also need to leave thumbed images for the same reason? (3) Leaving a missing image (or a "no image" placeholder) practically begs newbies to put the covers back in, making the whole problem worse. (4) We should be discouraging the "format" of listing discography info in gallery captions, not working around this obviously incorrect practice. (5) Empty images (or filler images) in galleries look messy; note that the "complete mess" of the Bob Schneider article referenced above is that the empty images weren't yet removed -- that mess would be exacerbated by the change Chubbles recommends. (6) The info is still available in an HTML comment, if a person wants to manually put the information in the correct place. For all these reasons, I don't thing Chubbles' recommended change would be beneficial. – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 20:19, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

It is not clear to most editors why gallery format for discographies is discouraged by Wikipedia policy. (That's why thousands of band pages have discographies put in this format.) It is all well and good to nudge people in that direction - but not at the cost of removing important information; and the albums recorded by notable artists are arguably the most important information about them that can be provided. There is also the problem that, by removing the names of albums, some of these pages will become candidates for deletion. If you remove one album from a page of a band who has released two albums on an important label, they may appear to no longer meet the criteria for WP:MUSIC - and having spent enough time at AfD to know, it may well be that no one notices until it's too late.

I think a better way to encourage formatting of discographies as galleries could be to create a warning tag - say, {{baddiscography}} or something - which says "this discography should be reformatted according to Wikipedia policy" or something. After all, ImageRemovalBot's way of doing things isn't helping keep galleries of discography pages; people who notice the images getting deleted usually re-upload the images and add them back to the galleries (seen this happening already, as I clean up after IMB's mess). Chubbles 23:31, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

This bot is broken and needs to be stopped until it's fixed. I noticed the same issue on Trail of Dead -81.178.126.124 19:01, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

Edit-warring bots

Following this thread, I have decided to start here a more general discussion on whether bots should be allowed to keep doing controversial or even against-consensus edits. In my opinion, it's quite obvious that bots should not engage in edit warring with humans (apart from the cases of vandalism). I therefore propose to add something to this effect to the policy. At this moment, I don't see any exception other than reversion of vandalism, but I am sure there must be other ones. My suggestion is that bot should not revert humans unless explicitely authorized to do so. Tizio 01:06, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

the thing is the bot doesnt know its reverting, interwiki bots do their job they make interwiki links. they are not human, all they see is page foo should have X,Y, and Z interwiki links. if the page doesnt have them it adds it. bot cannot think dont know they are reverting users. β^_command 01:11, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

I gave it for granted that bots were reverting unintentionally (otherwise, they are presumed to be approved for that). The problem is: are we letting bots enter or create edit wars just because this way they are technically simpler to code? I again assume that bots work for the convenience of humans, not the other way around. Tizio 01:21, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

since this is not just one bot (its all of our pywikipedia interwiki bots) have you talked with the pywikipedia development team? they can be found on irc://freenode/pywikipediabot or did you file a pywiki bug request to have this addressed? β^_command 01:48, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

Yes, Fut.Perf. did this a few months ago, see Wikipedia:Bot owners' noticeboard#Interwiki bots forcing unwanted links, again, but did not get an answer. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 07:33, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

Small hint: The (wiki) world is larger than enwiki, and pywikipedia developers really are not going to check all 200+ local bot pages for feature requests or bugs. If you've got a bug or a feature request, file it at the bug tracker of pywikipediabot, not at a local page. See the pywikipediabot website. ValHallASW 10:07, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

Please do some research before being sarcastic. Wikipedia:Bot owners' noticeboard#Interwiki bots forcing unwanted links, again is where Fut.Perf. said that he made the request. I hoped that it wouldn't be necessary to chase down the links, but apparently it is. The feature request was posed on meta (m:Talk:Interwiki.py) and the pywikipedia mailing list (post). -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 10:47, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

See this link. Pywikipedia now supports {{nobots}}, i just tested it with my bot on Ingria and the page was skipped. So if you dont want bots on a page, just but the nobots template on it and the pywikipedia interwiki bots will skip the page. multichill 09:47, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

That's only the case with the latest version of the framework, if I recall correctly. — madman bum and angel 11:39, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

Yes. It doesnt work in old versions of the framework. Bot operators are supposed to keep their bot up to date. It's fixed in r4096, we are now at r4100. multichill 12:31, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

And what if they don't? A call to block all pywiki bots that are not on the latest release to fix a single page problem seems like overkill, no? — xaosflux ^Talk 01:17, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

No, I don't think it's overkill to block those bots that add the ru-sib interwiki link to that one page. It's not that much work to upgrade, and the policy says it should be done on a daily basis. I think the latter may be a bit strict, but if you cause problems by not upgrading, that's a valid reason for blocking the bot. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 02:47, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

How about not being a WP:DICK and just ask the bot op to update? β^_command 03:09, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

Good point. I fully agree that if it's not urgent (which I think to be the case here), then we should ask first, instead of blocking without warning. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 05:17, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

A point that is perhaps missing in the discussion above is that it is the operator's responsibility to ensure that the bot is working correctly, not of the people pointing out bugs. The discussion so far: A says "this bot shouldn't add these links", B,C, and D reply "go to the xxx framework developers (who have no specific responsibility regarding this particular wiki) and convince them to do some changes". This is wrong. It's againts the main principle of the bot policy: operators are responsible for their bots, and a bot working against consensus is buggy. Tizio 10:56, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

Please dont be a WP:DICK, as a bot operator myself I have observed some things. When a bot is functioning properly it and its operator are ignored. If there is any problems, real or imaginary, instead of being nice about it and addressing the operator in a nice, calm, civil manner, people come screaming at us saying that "your d*m F*#k&*g bot screwed up and messed my page up" and that is about the sum of most complaints. instead of trying to address the root of the issue bot operators are abused. As for your It's against the main principle of the bot policy lets address the issue at hand. about the only tool that does interwiki linking Pywikipedia has a content dispute on a single page about a single link. The obvious solution that comes to mind, address the root of the problem find and talk to the development team of pywiki and attempt to find a solution. if AWB has an error you dont go to the user who operates AWB and expect them to fix AWB, no you address the AWB developers. To a point I agree with your statement though if this were not such a large class of bots I would say bring that to the operators attention in a civilized manner. but in either method as with anything follow up and clear communication are critical. β^_command 00:25, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

Wrong example ;-) I indeed once asked the author of AWB about a problem about it, and the answer was that the editors using AWB are responsible for every edit they make (the problem was that several editors where incorrectly "cleaning up" a point of ASCII where the non-clean version was indeed correct; I suggested a solution similar to that proposed by Fut.Perf. on this issue).

The issue here is: what is more important, the consensus of editors or the easiness of building bots? When you say "don't make changes only because of one page", you are saying that, at least in some cases, coding easiness has precedence. This is against the principle that bots exist to help human editors. Perhaps we should change our policy to "human editors are allowed to edit if they do not interfere with bots", then.

As for the civility issue, I just don't understand. Am I being a dick for saying that human editors are more important than bots? I too maintain a bot, and I too get complaints. The ones about this issue has been civil, at least the ones I have read. If a bot is operating incorrectly, what do you expect the complainers to do? Go away when you say "it's not my fault, in spite of the bot owner being me"? That's not the way of maintaining a piece of software. Tizio 13:11, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

As for the AWB example I was talking about errors that AWB itself makes not choices the user makes. (these are few and rare but happen) One point that I should point out that most interwiki bot ops are not programmers themselves, instead like I said address the root of the issue. I never said "don't make changes only because of one page". your method of handling the issue was a little off. how you handled the AWB problem was ok, but instead of doing the same thing with the interwiki bot that is maintained by the pywiki team you try to block the bots, even though those operators cannot do anything about it themselves because the code is maintained by someone else. as referring to WP:DICK you missed it. your idea of straight blocking is a little too harsh. β^_command 00:35, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the clarification: I wasn't the one who blocked the bot, although I generally support blocking a bot when there is a problem with it and its operator flatly refuses to acknowledge the problem (which means they are not going to ever fix it). IMO, it is the bot operators' responsibility to contact the developers about possible problems with their bots. Otherwise, we may have the situation when nobody is responsible for bots because operators aren't developers and developers aren't Wikipedia editors. Tizio 13:16, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

To a point I agree, if this wasnt such a large class of bots, (interwiki) and this as a single bot then I agree if the operator doesnt listen block the bot. But interwiki bots are kinda the exception to that. There are several pywiki people on en.wikipedia. Cyde, Misza13, and ValHallASW. I am not a pywiki dev myself but I do work with the framework, and can attempt to poke the devs to fix it. Personally I wouldnt mind if I was considered a dev on en.wiki (I use pywiki for all my bots) and I would be happy to try and help. β^_command 15:20, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

It appears that there is a consensus of the bot developers, and supported by the operators (who could always just NOT operate the bot) that all foundation language wikipedia articles should link to all the other language versions of the same article. People who don't speak that other language aren't going to follow the link there, and if they are multi-lingual odds are they are not limited to just en: and ru-sib:, so they will still end up there when following the links on all of the other languages. Not speaking ru-sub, can I assume that this dispute is summed up with not wanting to link to them because

1. The ru-sib: article is not written from NPOV, and though you've tried to correct it it remains that way and?
2. The ru-sib: wikipedia does not subscribe to NPOV, and dispute resolution there has been exhausted?

If so that makes the case that en: shouldn't link to ru-sub: ever. — xaosflux ^Talk 15:25, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

'who could always just NOT operate the bot': i.e. you would like to update all interwiki links on enwiki by hand? It's fairly easy to create a switch for the bot to never write to enwiki... but I assume we can agree that is not an acceptable alternative?

Anyway; if ru-sib does not subscribe to NPOV, it should be *closed*. IMO it is not up to editors of a certain page on enwiki to oppose to a decision to keep ru-sib open in a way that could very well be described as Civil disobedience. Just my $0.02 ValHallASW 19:25, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

I personally would certainly support closing ru-sib, and I quite agree that, in the absence of a meta decision to that effect, a project-level decision at enwiki would still be preferable to fighting this out at the individual article level. For the record, there is no "decision to keep ru-sib open" either. There's a proposal for closure at meta, which has been running for more than half a year and has resulted in a very strong supermajority in favour of closing. As appears from the talk page, the only reason no binding decision either way has been taken is that none of the stewards wants to assume the responsibility. In which case, I'm certainly of the opinion enwiki would be entitled to go ahead and make its own decisions.

However, on the individual level, if editors do oppose a link on an individual article level, for whatever reasons, I as an admin still have no justification for just telling them they are wrong and they should just shut up. There may be a "consensus of the bot developers, and supported by the operators", but bot developers and operators don't get to dictate policy, so the local objectors still have the right to expect their position to be taken seriously in a normal dispute resolution process. That's why my initial reaction was: we first need to get the bots out of the way, on this page, and then let the humans work out the underlying content issue. Fut.Perf. ☼ 07:37, 27 August 2007 (UTC)