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

Tue May 6 12:58:49 UTC 2003

At 03:52 AM 5/6/03 +0000, Tomos wrote:
>Hello. I have a question about the use of a bot.
>
>After some trials-and-errors, we wikipedians in Japanese 'pedia are now 
>starting to use an outside BBS (prepared by one of the active wikipedians) 
>for our discussion of basic policies and other site-wide issues. And in 
>conjunction with it, we are wondering if it is okay to use a bot to 
>automatically update a page within wikipedia (something like 
>[Wikipedia:Discussions_at_WikipediaBBS]) which displays info. on recent 
>postings occuring at the BBS.<snip>
>While at least some of us think that we can improve the way we use 
>Wkipedia:Village_pump and make it workable, (and of course I cannot deny 
>that there is a possibility that the BBS turn out to be problematic in 
>other ways,) many of active users think we would try the BBS for now.
>
>2. Why a bot is helpful
>
>Bot is good for two reasons. It saves users time by automatically creating 
>the content that the user would want to post. It helps others (those of us 
>who do not always check on the BBS) to stay informed of what's going on in 
>the BBS.
>
>As it is preliminary designed and implemented, the bot does two things: 
>(a) automatically create a page content for a specific page something like 
>[[Wikipedia:Discussions in the Wikipedia BBS]] and (b) with a click of a 
>mouse, the user will be taken automatically to the edit mode of the page 
>(now in wikipedia) with the auto-generated content. -The content is not 
>saved/posted at this stage. The user still has to confirm the content by 
>pressing the "save" button.
>
>In other words, the bot does not automatically update any content. It 
>generate the content that users can save.
>
>I am aware that some of you are quite against the use of bot. So I offer 
>some defense here.
>
>First, the Special:Recent_changes will not be flooded. The bot works only 
>with a human confirming the content. The pace of the activities cannot be 
>faster than that of humans.

 From what you describe, the bot should not cause any problems. The 
objections to
bots are that they overload either Recent_changes or the processors, 
neither of which
will happen here.

-- 
Vicki Rosenzweig
vr at redbird.org
http://www.redbird.org