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

Wed May 7 13:01:13 UTC 2003

Just answering some of the questions regarding why we are trying the BBS in 
Japanese wikipedia.

Again, a long posting. (I'm sorry about it.)

(1) The current BBS

The BBS was written by a user "Hoge-", not from scratch but based on a
free-software (no-charge for nonprofits, okay to modify). It uses perl and 
cgi.

It is hosted by a server s/he has control over. When I notified Jimbo's 
question, if the
BBS needs to be hosted by some official(?) wikipedia server, s/he said there 
are still some
works to be done, so s/he prefers to have the BBS at the current server.

Before, another user also offered to host it if necessary. And s/he said 
when the current
server run out of resource for some reasons, s/he would ask and pass the 
BBS.

(2) How we come to think of using the BBS

I guess this part is not so informative if your interest is just on the BBS 
v. Mailing list issue.

We discussed the matter at Village_pump, and the options included mailing 
list, a page inside
wikipedia (Village_pump), and a BBS. We made observations about pros and 
cons, but no one
pushed nor criticized any option very hard (which is somewhat usual in 
Japanese 'pedia, though I'm
not sure if this is attributable to some Japanese cultural norms like 
modesty and stronger
collectivism or something else).

Since no one made a suggestion, I searched on the web and suggested a free 
BBS (with ads). In
responce, Hoge- (the user) observed that it has many limitations (we cannot 
customize much), and
said that s/he will try to build a BBS for us

Some time has passed, and then some of us started talking about using 
Villege_pump in a better
way, (I personally didn't want to push Hoge- to build BBS ASAP for our 
discussion, so I was in to
that idea.)

Sometime around that time, it became clear that some of the archived 
messages of the mailing list
are not readable. Some characters are not handled properly somewhere in the 
process. It wasn't
clear if immediate solution can be found. After all, the list was just 
created and not used much.
(We haven't decided how to use it.)

Then, Hoge- said s/he will build the BBS soon, and indeed s/he did. Some 
users celebrated
Hoge-'s work. No one voiced that we should try to find solution for the 
mailing list and use it,
or stick to the Village_pump plan.

So we started.

(3) BBS v. Mailing list

First, a disclaimer: I don't know if I have reasons to defend the use of BBS 
against some
of the harshest critics among you. As mentioned above, we did not chose the 
BBS after a
heated debate or with the cost of transition from an existing list to the 
BBS.

The main problem with the mailing list is that some archived messages become 
unreadable.
(Some pointed that it should be the mailing list software. And we will ask 
further help from
Jason soon.)

Additional disadvantages (as perceived and voiced by Japanese wikipedia 
users):

-Reading the archived postings is a bit more difficult than reading BBS 
threads. Getting a quick
overview is especially hard.

-Reading through the archived postings takes time when wikipedia is slow, 
(which is quite frequent
these days.)

-Discussion on a BBS (and on pages on Wikipedia) tend to be more focused and 
continuous
perhaps because they are written with the previous postings in the same 
screen, rather than in
one's memory. (though this may not always be a disadvantage).

-Because the arrival of the messages are not included in the 
Special:Recent_changes, discussion
seems a bit remote from the activities taking place on the web. (Though it 
is okay for some
topics.)

-Harder to link to pages on wikipedia. (some clients don't support html 
links)

The last two disadvantages were shared with BBS, but Hoge- solved them by 
changing codes
and making the bot I mentioned in the previous email.

(4) misc.

Just for your information: one user in Japanese 'pedia also recommended the 
''http://phpbb.com/'' ,
the site Hunter mentioned earlier.

cheers,

Tomos

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