I am curious why the note that I sent about this issue seemed to end
the thread, with no follow-up. Has this kind of option been rejected in
the past? This seems to be a fairly standard security/authentication
issue and I believe that the technology I suggested is the kind of
thing that would be fairly obvious. Am I wrong about something here?
Just to add, with a authentication architecture, you could much more
easily offer offline editing with subsequent re-integration of the
content. Or am I swimming against the current here?
thanx - ray
Begin forwarded message:
From: ray(a)ganymede.org
Date: October 22, 2003 7:26:25 PM PDT
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)Wikipedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Re: Robot code: open source or lock away in
safe?
Reply-To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)Wikipedia.org>
It occurs to me that we could require bots to use a protocol to
guarantee their accountability. If one wants to use a bot, that person
would be given one-half of a private key. The other half would be kept
by the wiki servers.
We need to be able to detect bots. There are ways, in general, to do
this, but none are 100% reliable, but that might not be too much of a
problem. Any unauthorized bot would be denied access.
A bot wanting to be authorized would check in with their key and get
handed back a temporary key (a shorter, easier to confirm key) set to
last for some time. They can then use that to make their edits.
This is going to have to be done at some point. Why not get started
now? If we want bots to be allowed and to be well behaved, we need to
make them identifiable and accountable.
- ray
On Oct 22, 2003, at 6:30 PM, Tim Starling wrote:
Stevertigo wrote:
> --- Tim Starling <ts4294967296(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
>> I don't see what the problem is. A vandalbot and a
>> well-behaved bot are two different things. The common code is only a
>> small proportion. As long as sysops are not shy about blocking
>> clueless,
>> unapproved bots, I have no problem with making the code public.
> <snip>
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