Wikiversity talk:Bots

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[edit] Votes

[edit] Edit rate

Why is the edit rate so spread apart? On enwiki_p bots edit 4 times a minute, yet here the limit is twice a minute. --Draicone (talk) 10:12, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

Hopefully Sebmol will see this. Cormaggio 10:43, 7 October 2006 (UTC)
I would suggest that the limits at meta:Bot_policy#Edit_throttle_and_peak_hours meta are reasonable. (that is 12/min. off-peak, and 3 or 4 per min. during peak hours) Although, I would strongly recommend that the faster rate only be used if the bot is checking server load using mw:Manual:Maxlag parameter. --mikeu talk 03:05, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Policy?

I've noticed this has been marked as proposed policy for a while now, but unless there are any objections, can this be marked as policy in the next few days? It seems to me like it is fairly complete and reasonable. Michael Billington (talk • contribs) 05:56, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

I agree on marking as policy, not that three votes should become a standard for a Wikiversity:Quorum. I really like the wording, must, may, should, &... especially "are encouraged to". I should've named my bot idea tagbot but I named It, It just for fun. It's going to be an Integral part of a POE::Componant::IRC server/client game engine that plays tag, hide-and-seek and follow-the-leader by bouncing around IRC networks and channels in a fun and interesting way. (I hope) See w:User:Tractor CQ 02:36, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Learning about bots

The CS/AI division has initialized content development for a general study of bots. CQ 20:14, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] botwiki:python:revertAll.py

I have started writing a script to revert all edits (and, in the future, revert also all page-moves and delete or propose for deletion the pages it has created) of any user at once. It is also possible to limit the reverts to those edits after a given timestamp. I have not tested it at all. If anybody is interested, please comment. Or else I would leave it on the back-burner. Hillgentleman|Talk 03:49, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Name should include bot ?

In the expectations section is written:

"Bot operators should: choose a name containing the word "bot" so that editors realize they are dealing with an automaton"

Interestingly the bot Commons Delinker does not have bot in the name - anyone knows more about this ? Was this before the criteria was defined ? ----Erkan Yilmaz Wikiversity:Chat 20:01, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

As I see the "should" is less strong, so I guess it is not a criteria that must be fulfilled ? ----Erkan Yilmaz Wikiversity:Chat 20:07, 15 March 2008 (UTC)
Yes, I would very much recommend that "bot" be included in the name, but it is not currently a requirement. Also, the Commons Delinker probably predates this policy. --mikeu talk 03:05, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

[edit] bot status log

The Bot status log does not show the recent addition of bot status for ArthurBot, however the User rights log does show it. I wonder if this is a change to the mediawiki software... --mikeu talk 23:03, 16 January 2009 (UTC)

Seems like it. I think there was a move towards using a uniform interface for all flags including the bot flag, so that might be part of it. --darkYin yang.svglama 23:40, 16 January 2009 (UTC)
I see the problem now. I had used Special:UserRights to add to the Bot group, instead of Special:Makebot. They each use a different log. I think it makes sense to stick to using Makebot. --mikeu talk 18:40, 25 January 2009 (UTC)
Special:Makebot is now obsolete. Mediawiki prefer the using of Special:UserRights instead of the another.Crochet.david 18:51, 25 January 2009 (UTC)
Thanks for the info, I see that this is so. (mw:Makebot) I'll update the instructions. --mikeu talk 01:38, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

[edit] bot requests

I have added a sample format to Wikiversity:Bots/Status for requesting bot status. Please comment and suggest improvements or changes. --mikeu talk 03:05, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

[edit] editing rate

I'd like to reopen the old discussion above on editing rate. I think it might be in our interest to bring the editing rate more inline with the wikimedia norms. This would allow a bot that is doing cross-wiki work (for example checking interwiki links) to run at the same rate on all projects. Here is the text from meta:Bot policy that I would suggest including in our policy:

Bots running without a bot flag should edit at intervals of over 1 minute. Once they have been authorised and appropriately flagged, they should operate at an absolute minimum interval of 5 seconds (12 edits per minute). Bots should try to avoid running during the busiest hours, as they rapidly use server resources that should be reserved for human readers and editors. During these hours, they should operate at intervals of 20 seconds (3 edits per minute) to conserve resources.

Bots' editing speeds can be automatically adjusted based on server load (slave database server lag) by appending an extra parameter to the query string of each requested URL; see mw:Manual:Maxlag parameter.

Thoughts? --mikeu talk 11:00, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

Since we run on the same servers as all the other projects, there is no technical reason why we cannot have the edit rates set out at meta:Bot policy. Beyond the technical aspects, I don't really see any other issues. If a bot goes wrong it is the responsibility of the operator to correct its mistakes so they should only edit at a rate which would accumulate a number of edits before a problem was spotted that they'd be prepared to promptly revert if necessary. Adambro 11:23, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

If there are no objections, I'll go ahead and remove the line "not make more than four edits per minute" and add the above text as a guideline. --mikeu talk 19:27, 1 September 2009 (UTC)

Wikimedia server cluster structure
Given the relatively small edits per day on en.wv, I don't see any particular reason for throttling bots at all, outside of the operator's comfort level. I suspect that the meta policy stems from wikipedian issues, which probably don't apply to a small wiki like this one. --SB_Johnny talk 22:41, 1 September 2009 (UTC)
Actually, I think there is. Commons and en-wp appear to be on their own server farms, while en-wv is on another server farm with all the rest of the foundation wikis. (Click on diagram at right and see S3 under Databases. It is a little out of date, but you get the idea) So it is not just the low edit rate on en-wv, it is the sum of all the rest of the wikis that determines the load. The bot that I've been running checks the database maxlag and will slow down if the lag is high. I've actually seen the bot slow down a few times due to this. No one bot or a dozen will have an impact on the server farm. However, there are likely hundreds of (or more?) bots running at the same time across all the wikis on the same servers. The general view is that human editors should be given preference for fast response time and bots can do the work when things have slowed down. --mikeu talk 04:46, 2 September 2009 (UTC)
Symbol support vote.svg Support. The Jade Knight (d'viser) 18:44, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

Vista-clean.png Done [1] --mikeu talk 00:02, 3 September 2009 (UTC)


[edit] bot learning projects

I've been learning about bots and have been thinking of creating a bot project here at wv. One thing that I would like to discuss is bot editing before a bot is aproved and flagged. Here is some text from the wikipedia policy:

All bots that make any logged actions (such as editing a page, uploading files or creating accounts) must be approved before they may operate. Operators may carry out limited testing of bot processes without approval, provided that test edits are very low in number and frequency, and are restricted to test pages such as the sandbox. Such test edits may be made from any user account. In addition, any bot or automated editing process that affects only the operators', or their own, user and talk pages (or subpages thereof), and which are not otherwise disruptive, may be run without prior approval.

w:Wikipedia:Bot_policy#Approval

What does everyone think of adding something like this to our policy? I would suggest that anyone participating in a learning project here be allowed to edit with a bot within certain restrictions. This would include a much lower editing rate to prevent flooding recent changes and being restricted to userspace. Thoughts?? --mikeu talk 21:53, 11 September 2009 (UTC)

Considering that the Archiving bot, still hasn't recognized my account months later, I am beginning to think that I need my own bot just to keep my account archived. Being able to edit a copybot of somesort, would make it easier to design my own archiving tool, since I am unfamiliar with the bot level programming required.

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