Proposal:Wikimedia Foundation 'bot adoption' programme
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- Achieve continued growth in readership
- Focus on quality content
- Increase Participation
- Stabilize and improve the infrastructure
- Encourage Innovation
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Summary
Many WMF projects rely extensively on bots (aka: software agents) for essential maintenance and monitoring tasks. The toolserver, and possibly some of the quality of such, can have a particularly detrimental impact on a project community through unreliability.
Proposal
- That, through discussion with various project communities, the 'political' or 'ethical' scope of acceptable software agents is defined
- That WMF technical staff document standards for any software agent's maximum resource use, acceptable coding standards - or any freely-available guides they would accept - and a list of criteria that would be applied in security-checking and reviewing candidate bots
Motivation
- Wikinews relies on Melancholiebot to update a most popular articles section on the main page, at this time it has been dead for a few days.
- A variety of other bots are used by multiple projects - such as those which auto-sign comments, revert probable vandalism based on content/contributor criteria, create interwiki links, perform project-namespace and user talk page automated archiving.
Key Questions
- Resources required from WMF
- Potential for trusted non-WMF people to audit code
- Requirement for robust stop/start/pause frameworks
Potential Costs
- WMF Developer Time
References
Community Discussion
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