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

Tue May 6 03:52:55 UTC 2003

Hello. I have a question about the use of a bot.

After some trials-and-errors, we wikipedians in Japanese 'pedia are now 
starting to use an outside BBS (prepared by one of the active wikipedians) 
for our discussion of basic policies and other site-wide issues. And in 
conjunction with it, we are wondering if it is okay to use a bot to 
automatically update a page within wikipedia (something like 
[Wikipedia:Discussions_at_WikipediaBBS]) which displays info. on recent 
postings occuring at the BBS.

Now I think I should explain two things - why we (some of us) think outside 
BBS is good, and why the bot is helpful for that.

1. Why we think outside BBS is good

For discussion purposes, we have three options.
Meta, talkpage, and some dedicated pages in the Wikipedia namespace.

Meta is not user-friendly because its interface is in English.

We tried talk pages, but there happened too many discussions of overlapping 
topics, and it was hard for latecomers to join, because the discussions are 
taking place in many places (some unknown to the newcomers), hard to 
reconstruct the dialogue spanning multiple talkpages. It is also difficult 
for anybody to revisit the past discussions and decisions, because the 
records are scattered.

Then we tried Wikipedia:Village_pump as a place for discussion and 
decision-making regarding site-wide issues - naming conventions, spelling 
conventions, disambiguation policies, admin selections, basic style and 
layout issues, and so on. Some are re-doing of what people did in English 
wikipeida, some are more or less unique to Japanese wikipedia. We faced some 
problems again. The major ones are (a)32kb limit for some browsers, and (b) 
too many issues to be discussed within the limited space (though we used 
subpages, etc.). I can also point out that (c) there are several yet-to-be 
understood bugs/troubles related to display and character encoding (some 
characters turn jibrish, some characters automatically get deleted, some 
characters are visible only in editing box, and at least a few more), and 
outside BBS is a good place to discuss about the problem without being 
annoyed by the very problem we talk about. Some others pointed out (d) 
Wikipedia is slow or down too often these days, and it is better to have 
outside place we can work on.

While at least some of us think that we can improve the way we use 
Wkipedia:Village_pump and make it workable, (and of course I cannot deny 
that there is a possibility that the BBS turn out to be problematic in other 
ways,) many of active users think we would try the BBS for now.

2. Why the bot is helpful

2. Why a bot is helpful

Bot is good for two reasons. It saves users time by automatically creating 
the content that the user would want to post. It helps others (those of us 
who do not always check on the BBS) to stay informed of what's going on in 
the BBS.

As it is preliminary designed and implemented, the bot does two things: (a) 
automatically create a page content for a specific page something like 
[[Wikipedia:Discussions in the Wikipedia BBS]] and (b) with a click of a 
mouse, the user will be taken automatically to the edit mode of the page 
(now in wikipedia) with the auto-generated content. -The content is not 
saved/posted at this stage. The user still has to confirm the content by 
pressing the "save" button.

In other words, the bot does not automatically update any content. It 
generate the content that users can save.

I am aware that some of you are quite against the use of bot. So I offer 
some defense here.

First, the Special:Recent_changes will not be flooded. The bot works only 
with a human confirming the content. The pace of the activities cannot be 
faster than that of humans.

Second, the way it works, it cannot be abused by some mal-intended users to 
overload the server.

If no objection, some of us would complete the bot and show to admins for 
the final check.

Many thanks,

Tomos

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