Following a review of the draft, edits performed by all users since initial draft:
Although most edits to this page are straightforward, I have comments on one of these.
The issue of concern here is role accounts, generally strongly discouraged or forbidden on English Wikipedia.
In the case of bots there are reasons why this may be sensible to relax a bit, centering on two differences between "bot" accounts and "human" accounts - bot accounts typically have much less flexibility in some cases (many bots can only do very specific types of edit and would have very limited access), and, in many cases the person operating 1/ has limited ability to modify the designated work it performs or perform inappropriate tasks, and 2/ cannot operate the bot without positive authorization and user verification.
It is clear that in some cases there will be benefit to allowing more than one user to operate the bot for its owner; obviously some criteria should apply but on the whole complete prohibition seems unecessary.
I've asked round arbcom and whilst the answer is informal, the consensus seems to be that this is a matter for BAG to decide how it feels, ie, whether in some cases it may be advantageous to provide that specific bots could be approved to be operated by more than one person, and which cases those are, which can then be discussed within any given bot's BRFA.
This would also tie in with existing wording, "Providing some mechanism which allows contributors other than the bot's operator to control the bot's operation is useful in some circumstances".
I've added what seem the most important criteria, but thought it was important to reassure on this point.
Diff [5]
FT2 (
Talk |
email)
04:47, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
"[...] not all approved bots need (or should have) that property." - While not all bots need the flag, I can see no possible reason why they shouldn't have the flag. As bots have the ability to mark their edits as bot (hidden) edits, or not, there is no reason not to have the flag. There are, also, benefits to having the flag other than hiding edits. One is the ability for editors to identify (approved) bots from Special:Listusers/bot. -- Cobi( t| c| b) 07:19, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
I for one would like to see the BAG abolished and allow bots to be commented on by everyone. It's simply another status thing for some people. On Commons, the process is part of the RfA page, and allows anybody to discuss it, and the final decision is made by a bureaucrat, not by a member of a little group. Bot approval should be more open to the community, and we need to get rid of silly little groups that only appear to be there for the sake of being there. Majorly ( talk) 12:42, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
Do you have a good alternative to suggest? — Coren (talk) 16:43, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
FT2 wrote:
Bots arent the same as many other decisions; they can have wide repercussions if subtly wrong or substandard somehow
You can say the exact same thing for administrators. Why don't we make an AAG, to approve admins in the same way? Majorly ( talk) 16:48, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
"I for one would like to see the BAG abolished and allow bots to be commented on by everyone." - Do you have a drama fetish? They can be commented on by anyone. You're not on BAG. Get over it. Or, participate in discussion on BAG, where the idea has been raised that we can have "lay" members on BAG, responsible for representing the community view. Mart inp23 18:49, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
I'm going to carry on now, because I don't care anymore. Majorly: you're looking at the BAG through some old bias which you have against it. Above, I insinuate that it's because this is a pie that, at the moment, it's unlikely you'll be able to get your finger into. I may be wrong there. In any case, you need to take another look at BAG before making comments like this, and like the blog post I just read. You are good at inciting drama, it must be said, however often I don't think it's the best thing to do. Bestest wishes, Mart inp23 18:52, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
Why am I so fired up about this? Because I literally spent hours, a lot of it with others, working out the best ways to make the bot approvals process, and BAG, as open as possible. To have an individual come along and start kicking up a fuss, using arguments that are months out of date by now is, shall I say, infuriating. Actually, it's worse than that. It's downright mind-numbingly uncurteous, unfair, and absolutely annoying. MAJORLY: CHECK YOUR FACTS. Mart inp23 18:56, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
I agree with Majorly. The current bot approval process is a pain in the arse. The last time, I wanted an approval to remove a single line from a template in 90,000 articles; a simple procedure, and there was a clear need for it. The complete process took almost a month, and none of it was of any use to me; all feedback I got was after I started running for real. I believe this is because my proposal was so uncontroversial, that none of the BAG members deemed it necessary to comment, and so my proposal languished. The previous system was much better: if no-one objected after some days, you were free to run the bot. The current process is just putting hurdles in place without any benefit to the bot operator or Wikipedia.
In future, I'm going to follow Cyde's example, and skip the approval phase. I've shown that I have enough technical competence to run a bot, and the necessity of the tasks that I propose, and the details of the edits that my bot will make, are better discussed at appropriate wikiprojects. I will of course consult them, but I don't see any need for a (content-less) BAG review. -- Eugène van der Pijll ( talk) 21:44, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
We are not overly bureaucratic. A task takes just a few days to be approved. We ask a few questions to check for sanity, allow you to go through a trial period, and give sufficient time for a bit of any community input. It probably takes about as long as the approval process on commons (possibly less time), and the main hold-up is always bot operators.
On the other hand, blocking unapproved bots is part of maintaining a credible approval process. If bots that were useful were allowed to continue without approval, nobody would bother with it. — Werdna talk 05:53, 10 April 2008 (UTC)
You're missing the point, Eugene. The point of a bot approval process is to determine whether a bot process is useful and harmless, and therefore ought to be allowed. It is not unreasonable to require operators to go through with a week or so's approval process to make sure that we don't have bots running rampant and breaking things. — Werdna talk 00:29, 12 April 2008 (UTC)
I recently reactivated Werdnabot, and went through the appropriate approvals process. I insisted on doing so as there had been substantial changes to both my code, and the code of MediaWiki, despite the opinions of many that I needn't have bothered. In the process of my trial run, about four errors were found and fixed by astute users and members of the approvals group. I hold that this demonstrates that even experienced developers and bot operators make mistakes, and it is not a waste of time to force them to suffer what you consider to be an insulting indignity, in which the main hold-up is users. — Werdna talk 03:08, 13 April 2008 (UTC)
Excuse the sarcasm, but two whole days? However did you manage? It takes me much longer than that to get code live on Wikimedia, and I've written hundreds of features. — Werdna talk 00:29, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
Coren asked for comments, so here are mine. Overall I think this is pretty clear and generally matches the current practice. One requirement that seems to have been dropped is that bots have to indicate in their edit summaries that they are a bot.
The part about limiting edit rates is reasonable, but someone should check with a developer about what their preferred stance is. My memory is that maxlag is the preferred method of rate limiting, with a maxlag of say 4 or 5 seconds for nonaggressive bots. The current text seems very neutral about maxlag versus a simple delay between edits.
I rephrased one of the requirements to say "does not consume resources unnecessarily". I think this would be better as "does not consume resources inappropriately"; necessary is a high standard.
A frequently asked question about bots is how much activity a semi-automatic bot can have before it needs to be flagged. Have you considered adding a conservative rule of thumb here? I usually use the arbitrary rule that if you routinely have 5 edits/min sustained for 20 minutes or so, you should think about getting a bot flag. The main point of that is to reassure people who are only making 50 total edits that they don't need a flag.
I would be interested to see a mockup of the BAG confirmation page; I don't understand yet exactly what is in mind there. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 12:54, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
This proposal does not yet address most of the recent problems. My particular concerns are as follows:
In short, although I can see that this page is an improvement over the current bot policy, I think that there is still a lot of work to be done, particularly in the direction of defining for the reader what an archetypal approved bot account should look like. AKAF ( talk) 15:16, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
(outdent) I disagree with an absolute one task per bot account rule in the strongest possible terms. As in all things of this nature, it is a result of one or two accounts doing things that annoy a large number of people, and now suddenly everyone has to follow new overly stringent rules that serve in most circumstances utterly no purpose. For example, I presently run three different tasks through one account, have another that's completed but I might want to do again later, am in the process of adding another, and also do high speed semiautomated editing. Why should I be expected to open five different accounts? Only two of the tasks involve high speed unsupervised editing that might require blocking, but that has never happened to me and I sincerely doubt that it ever will as one of the tasks is actively maintained by an extremely experienced operator and the other I rarely run anymore anyway, and involves a narrowly defined task that has no changing parameters. And then I would like to be able to add tasks now and again without wasting too much of my time. I would imagine, also, that the people arguing in favor of this have no idea how annoying it would be to code for this. I'd either have to have four or five different distributions of Pywikipedia wasting space on my hard drive which I would have to maintain individually or use some symbolic links nonsense which it doesn't even have instructions how to make except in Linux which I am having difficulty using at the moment. It's bureaucratic nonsense at its worst; if someone like the instigator of this whole mess is abusing his bot account, then make him break his tasks down into different accounts by having a proviso declaring that BAG may require this of certain bot owners at their own discretion. Don't punish the good guys for the actions of a few, all you'll do is drive away your already sparse coding resources, not to mention add even more work to the bureaucrats who have to flag all of these redundant bot accounts.-- Dycedarg ж 00:31, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
I mind a "general rule of thumb", and discretion given as to the following of said rule, far less than I do a blanket "Each clearly delimited function of a bot should use a single, distinct account." I think it should be encouraged, mandated in some cases even, but that there should be no absolutes involved. That is, in my opinion, what BAG and the bot approval process is there for in the first place. They should be given the right to make approval contingent on some prerequisites, such as following nobots if it makes sense, or splitting the task away from a prior held bot account if it makes sense. I think your guidelines would make it easier to give bot operators an idea of what BAG will expect, but that they should be able to make a case for running their bot the way they see fit and barring any major objections then or later BAG should just let them. For me, I'm not going to split the bot as I use it at the moment into multiple accounts. Two of the tasks it does are very low in edit count per day and are utterly uncontroversial, to the extent that I never bothered with a BRFA for them. The other one runs very rarely, and when it does run it does all its work in chunks of a few hundred, maybe a thousand at most, and these chunks could hardly be considered to be interspersed with the edits of the other tasks. I might consider getting another account for the new task I'm getting approval for, as it is another one involving chunks of hundreds/thousands of edits, but I don't want to. Again, it will be run periodically, and it's edits will be in contiguous chunks that aren't interspersed with anything, and could be easily reverted en masse if necessary. Really, my primary objection to this whole thing is that I dislike in the extreme unnecessary complexity.-- Dycedarg ж 09:35, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
Wikipedia has become plastered with tags that are not really decorative. This is based on a theory of editing as realistic as the Marxist view of the common man. People don't start contributing knowing everything about these repurposed typographical symbols. About as many people read the manual before fiddling with their gadget as read all the Wiki edit guides before editing. (I've written manuals for a couple of decades and have so far only encountered one lonely example for this special category!!) I doubt there are many articles that are uploaded as a whole in pristine and compliant form (has there been one yet??) Most people will probably do things in bits and pieces and read a guide when they feel they need to. And then you get these bots sticking all manner of stickers on your evolving work. (e.g. I had the misfortune of using an underscore to make lines and a bot felt free to revert several hours worth of work without so much as a breather why!) Such things discourage new editors and if this is not to end steaming in it's own juice it needs frequent new blood. So here are a couple of suggestions. - bots that revert edits have to leave a line as to why on the "talk" page along with a way to get the deletion reverted. - bot tags have to be revisited once a month if they still apply - bots that complain about style or use of "code" symbols report to a page where programming jockeys can pick up tasks and help out. - people who run bots have to clean up a minimum number of complaints themselves or show a pool of other people that do (That works at our translators' site where you can only ask if you answer.) If not their bot gets the boot. Lisa4edit —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.236.23.111 ( talk) 12:38, 12 April 2008 (UTC)
Following a review of the draft, edits performed by all users since initial draft:
Although most edits to this page are straightforward, I have comments on one of these.
The issue of concern here is role accounts, generally strongly discouraged or forbidden on English Wikipedia.
In the case of bots there are reasons why this may be sensible to relax a bit, centering on two differences between "bot" accounts and "human" accounts - bot accounts typically have much less flexibility in some cases (many bots can only do very specific types of edit and would have very limited access), and, in many cases the person operating 1/ has limited ability to modify the designated work it performs or perform inappropriate tasks, and 2/ cannot operate the bot without positive authorization and user verification.
It is clear that in some cases there will be benefit to allowing more than one user to operate the bot for its owner; obviously some criteria should apply but on the whole complete prohibition seems unecessary.
I've asked round arbcom and whilst the answer is informal, the consensus seems to be that this is a matter for BAG to decide how it feels, ie, whether in some cases it may be advantageous to provide that specific bots could be approved to be operated by more than one person, and which cases those are, which can then be discussed within any given bot's BRFA.
This would also tie in with existing wording, "Providing some mechanism which allows contributors other than the bot's operator to control the bot's operation is useful in some circumstances".
I've added what seem the most important criteria, but thought it was important to reassure on this point.
Diff [5]
FT2 (
Talk |
email)
04:47, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
"[...] not all approved bots need (or should have) that property." - While not all bots need the flag, I can see no possible reason why they shouldn't have the flag. As bots have the ability to mark their edits as bot (hidden) edits, or not, there is no reason not to have the flag. There are, also, benefits to having the flag other than hiding edits. One is the ability for editors to identify (approved) bots from Special:Listusers/bot. -- Cobi( t| c| b) 07:19, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
I for one would like to see the BAG abolished and allow bots to be commented on by everyone. It's simply another status thing for some people. On Commons, the process is part of the RfA page, and allows anybody to discuss it, and the final decision is made by a bureaucrat, not by a member of a little group. Bot approval should be more open to the community, and we need to get rid of silly little groups that only appear to be there for the sake of being there. Majorly ( talk) 12:42, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
Do you have a good alternative to suggest? — Coren (talk) 16:43, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
FT2 wrote:
Bots arent the same as many other decisions; they can have wide repercussions if subtly wrong or substandard somehow
You can say the exact same thing for administrators. Why don't we make an AAG, to approve admins in the same way? Majorly ( talk) 16:48, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
"I for one would like to see the BAG abolished and allow bots to be commented on by everyone." - Do you have a drama fetish? They can be commented on by anyone. You're not on BAG. Get over it. Or, participate in discussion on BAG, where the idea has been raised that we can have "lay" members on BAG, responsible for representing the community view. Mart inp23 18:49, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
I'm going to carry on now, because I don't care anymore. Majorly: you're looking at the BAG through some old bias which you have against it. Above, I insinuate that it's because this is a pie that, at the moment, it's unlikely you'll be able to get your finger into. I may be wrong there. In any case, you need to take another look at BAG before making comments like this, and like the blog post I just read. You are good at inciting drama, it must be said, however often I don't think it's the best thing to do. Bestest wishes, Mart inp23 18:52, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
Why am I so fired up about this? Because I literally spent hours, a lot of it with others, working out the best ways to make the bot approvals process, and BAG, as open as possible. To have an individual come along and start kicking up a fuss, using arguments that are months out of date by now is, shall I say, infuriating. Actually, it's worse than that. It's downright mind-numbingly uncurteous, unfair, and absolutely annoying. MAJORLY: CHECK YOUR FACTS. Mart inp23 18:56, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
I agree with Majorly. The current bot approval process is a pain in the arse. The last time, I wanted an approval to remove a single line from a template in 90,000 articles; a simple procedure, and there was a clear need for it. The complete process took almost a month, and none of it was of any use to me; all feedback I got was after I started running for real. I believe this is because my proposal was so uncontroversial, that none of the BAG members deemed it necessary to comment, and so my proposal languished. The previous system was much better: if no-one objected after some days, you were free to run the bot. The current process is just putting hurdles in place without any benefit to the bot operator or Wikipedia.
In future, I'm going to follow Cyde's example, and skip the approval phase. I've shown that I have enough technical competence to run a bot, and the necessity of the tasks that I propose, and the details of the edits that my bot will make, are better discussed at appropriate wikiprojects. I will of course consult them, but I don't see any need for a (content-less) BAG review. -- Eugène van der Pijll ( talk) 21:44, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
We are not overly bureaucratic. A task takes just a few days to be approved. We ask a few questions to check for sanity, allow you to go through a trial period, and give sufficient time for a bit of any community input. It probably takes about as long as the approval process on commons (possibly less time), and the main hold-up is always bot operators.
On the other hand, blocking unapproved bots is part of maintaining a credible approval process. If bots that were useful were allowed to continue without approval, nobody would bother with it. — Werdna talk 05:53, 10 April 2008 (UTC)
You're missing the point, Eugene. The point of a bot approval process is to determine whether a bot process is useful and harmless, and therefore ought to be allowed. It is not unreasonable to require operators to go through with a week or so's approval process to make sure that we don't have bots running rampant and breaking things. — Werdna talk 00:29, 12 April 2008 (UTC)
I recently reactivated Werdnabot, and went through the appropriate approvals process. I insisted on doing so as there had been substantial changes to both my code, and the code of MediaWiki, despite the opinions of many that I needn't have bothered. In the process of my trial run, about four errors were found and fixed by astute users and members of the approvals group. I hold that this demonstrates that even experienced developers and bot operators make mistakes, and it is not a waste of time to force them to suffer what you consider to be an insulting indignity, in which the main hold-up is users. — Werdna talk 03:08, 13 April 2008 (UTC)
Excuse the sarcasm, but two whole days? However did you manage? It takes me much longer than that to get code live on Wikimedia, and I've written hundreds of features. — Werdna talk 00:29, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
Coren asked for comments, so here are mine. Overall I think this is pretty clear and generally matches the current practice. One requirement that seems to have been dropped is that bots have to indicate in their edit summaries that they are a bot.
The part about limiting edit rates is reasonable, but someone should check with a developer about what their preferred stance is. My memory is that maxlag is the preferred method of rate limiting, with a maxlag of say 4 or 5 seconds for nonaggressive bots. The current text seems very neutral about maxlag versus a simple delay between edits.
I rephrased one of the requirements to say "does not consume resources unnecessarily". I think this would be better as "does not consume resources inappropriately"; necessary is a high standard.
A frequently asked question about bots is how much activity a semi-automatic bot can have before it needs to be flagged. Have you considered adding a conservative rule of thumb here? I usually use the arbitrary rule that if you routinely have 5 edits/min sustained for 20 minutes or so, you should think about getting a bot flag. The main point of that is to reassure people who are only making 50 total edits that they don't need a flag.
I would be interested to see a mockup of the BAG confirmation page; I don't understand yet exactly what is in mind there. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 12:54, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
This proposal does not yet address most of the recent problems. My particular concerns are as follows:
In short, although I can see that this page is an improvement over the current bot policy, I think that there is still a lot of work to be done, particularly in the direction of defining for the reader what an archetypal approved bot account should look like. AKAF ( talk) 15:16, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
(outdent) I disagree with an absolute one task per bot account rule in the strongest possible terms. As in all things of this nature, it is a result of one or two accounts doing things that annoy a large number of people, and now suddenly everyone has to follow new overly stringent rules that serve in most circumstances utterly no purpose. For example, I presently run three different tasks through one account, have another that's completed but I might want to do again later, am in the process of adding another, and also do high speed semiautomated editing. Why should I be expected to open five different accounts? Only two of the tasks involve high speed unsupervised editing that might require blocking, but that has never happened to me and I sincerely doubt that it ever will as one of the tasks is actively maintained by an extremely experienced operator and the other I rarely run anymore anyway, and involves a narrowly defined task that has no changing parameters. And then I would like to be able to add tasks now and again without wasting too much of my time. I would imagine, also, that the people arguing in favor of this have no idea how annoying it would be to code for this. I'd either have to have four or five different distributions of Pywikipedia wasting space on my hard drive which I would have to maintain individually or use some symbolic links nonsense which it doesn't even have instructions how to make except in Linux which I am having difficulty using at the moment. It's bureaucratic nonsense at its worst; if someone like the instigator of this whole mess is abusing his bot account, then make him break his tasks down into different accounts by having a proviso declaring that BAG may require this of certain bot owners at their own discretion. Don't punish the good guys for the actions of a few, all you'll do is drive away your already sparse coding resources, not to mention add even more work to the bureaucrats who have to flag all of these redundant bot accounts.-- Dycedarg ж 00:31, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
I mind a "general rule of thumb", and discretion given as to the following of said rule, far less than I do a blanket "Each clearly delimited function of a bot should use a single, distinct account." I think it should be encouraged, mandated in some cases even, but that there should be no absolutes involved. That is, in my opinion, what BAG and the bot approval process is there for in the first place. They should be given the right to make approval contingent on some prerequisites, such as following nobots if it makes sense, or splitting the task away from a prior held bot account if it makes sense. I think your guidelines would make it easier to give bot operators an idea of what BAG will expect, but that they should be able to make a case for running their bot the way they see fit and barring any major objections then or later BAG should just let them. For me, I'm not going to split the bot as I use it at the moment into multiple accounts. Two of the tasks it does are very low in edit count per day and are utterly uncontroversial, to the extent that I never bothered with a BRFA for them. The other one runs very rarely, and when it does run it does all its work in chunks of a few hundred, maybe a thousand at most, and these chunks could hardly be considered to be interspersed with the edits of the other tasks. I might consider getting another account for the new task I'm getting approval for, as it is another one involving chunks of hundreds/thousands of edits, but I don't want to. Again, it will be run periodically, and it's edits will be in contiguous chunks that aren't interspersed with anything, and could be easily reverted en masse if necessary. Really, my primary objection to this whole thing is that I dislike in the extreme unnecessary complexity.-- Dycedarg ж 09:35, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
Wikipedia has become plastered with tags that are not really decorative. This is based on a theory of editing as realistic as the Marxist view of the common man. People don't start contributing knowing everything about these repurposed typographical symbols. About as many people read the manual before fiddling with their gadget as read all the Wiki edit guides before editing. (I've written manuals for a couple of decades and have so far only encountered one lonely example for this special category!!) I doubt there are many articles that are uploaded as a whole in pristine and compliant form (has there been one yet??) Most people will probably do things in bits and pieces and read a guide when they feel they need to. And then you get these bots sticking all manner of stickers on your evolving work. (e.g. I had the misfortune of using an underscore to make lines and a bot felt free to revert several hours worth of work without so much as a breather why!) Such things discourage new editors and if this is not to end steaming in it's own juice it needs frequent new blood. So here are a couple of suggestions. - bots that revert edits have to leave a line as to why on the "talk" page along with a way to get the deletion reverted. - bot tags have to be revisited once a month if they still apply - bots that complain about style or use of "code" symbols report to a page where programming jockeys can pick up tasks and help out. - people who run bots have to clean up a minimum number of complaints themselves or show a pool of other people that do (That works at our translators' site where you can only ask if you answer.) If not their bot gets the boot. Lisa4edit —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.236.23.111 ( talk) 12:38, 12 April 2008 (UTC)