Wikibooks:Requests for permissions/Dexbot

(bot)
My bot is global bot that has done interwiki migration to Wikidata in numerous wikis, Since in February 24th Wikibooks will also join Wikidata, interwikis are not needed anymore. Ladsgroup (discuss • contribs) 07:02, 20 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Could you describe the function of the bot please? For example, is it intended to migrate interwikis to Wikidata, to remove interwikis only, or something else? In addition, as far as I'm aware the exact structure of the Wikidata / Wikibooks relationship isn't fully defined yet. For example, it isn't agreed if there will be one association at the book main page level, or one association for every page within the book. Given this, if your bot is migrating interwikis to Wikidata, I don't think you can be ready to use it yet as the configuration requirements aren't finalised. Finally, I'd like to see some test edits without the bot flag to check it is working as expected. Thanks. QuiteUnusual (discuss • contribs) 10:22, 20 February 2015 (UTC)
 * The bot does both of them. I skip pages in the main namespace when there is "/" character in their title or if there is an interwiki conflict. About test edits, I can do test edits when the system is ready in February 24th but this task is trivial and has done successfully in Wikipedia, Wikivoyage, Wikiquote, Wikinews, and Wikisource already Ladsgroup (discuss • contribs) 14:28, 20 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Even so, I'd like to see a test, but not too many edits, not least because none of the projects you mention has FlaggedRevisions enabled and the last thing I want is every page getting flagged for manual review in error. QuiteUnusual (discuss • contribs) 15:12, 20 February 2015 (UTC)


 * My experience on Wikinews leaves me highly skeptical about the claim that "interwikis are not needed anymore". Wikidata centralization of such things does harm to sister projects in several ways.  (Wikidatans are mostly friendly people in my experience, but this makes no difference to these consequences of centralization.)  The centralization maximizes the damage that can be done to sister projects from a centralized location, while minimizing the ability of local projects to customize, change, or even maintain control of, how their own interwikis are handled, and while also minimizing local projects' ability to know when damage has been done (whether by malicious intent, benign intent, or accident).  Unfortunately, because Wikidata was implemented instead of some better alternative, this damage to the overall infrastructure of the sisterhood is probably something we'll have to live with permanently, but it doesn't follow that we should dismantle our local interwiki infrastructure, which is inherently both more flexible and more robust against all forms of centralized damage.


 * The claim about success on Wikinews is doubtful. Dexbot made a bunch of edits on en.wn in August, apparently contrary to local policy which requires first getting clearance from the local community before running a bot, and (somehow or other) it made those edits with the bot flag despite having never been granted the bot flag by the local community.  When the edits were noticed in October, the bot was blocked and a notification placed on the bot's user talk page that the local community would have to be applied to for permission to run the bot, and all the (300+) edits were de-sighted so they could be manually reviewed.  Since then, no application has been made on en.wn for permission to run the bot.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 15:27, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

What you said here is slightly unrelated to my intention and this RfBA. In Wikis with 1-to-1 logic (like Wikipedia, Wikivoyage, etc.) centralization is super useful but in other wikis still traditional interwikis must be in use but that doesn't mean you can't centralize the interwiki at all. Categories and templates are good examples. Job of the bot is to do the obvious but repetitive tasks and leave complicated ones to humans and you can see it. About the incident in English Wikinews, interwiki fixation is not a complicated task, bots get global flag about them and it's easy to run, error is low and even if it happens and you see an error, contact the bot operator and they fix it for you. My bot was removing interwiki links from *templates* in English Wikinews so it made zero harm to that wiki (exactly zero) and I used common sense Ladsgroup (discuss • contribs) 16:03, 20 February 2015 (UTC)


 * With respect, some of the liabilities of centralization arise even for Wikipedias; a close look at the list of disadvantages I gave above shows that some of them clearly apply to Wikipedias as well as to less Wikipedia-like projects. Yes there are advantages of centralization over the status quo ante (although this was my point about implementing Wikidata instead of something better; a better, more robust solution without lessening local control could have been devised and implemented, but wasn't, and now that Wikidata exists there's a good chance no better solution will ever be implemented).


 * It's worth noting that the more idiosyncratic a sister project is, the more problematic will be dependence on Wikidata for interwikis. Wikibooks is, in effect, a confederation of thousands of microprojects (books), each of which has its own peculiarities, which tends to maximize the sort of idiosyncracies that make use of Wikidata problematic.


 * I would agree that the Wikinews incident is only weakly related, though my main point was that Wikinews was being misleadingly cited as a "success". I do think it inaccurate to claim that no damage could be done because the edits were to templates.  It's been long enough that I no longer remember for sure whether there were things that needed correcting before manually sighting the edits made by the bot.  I do note that the use of global bots on en.wn is essentially a way of hiding violations of local policy, which is the sort of casual dissing of local control that leads to incautious centralization.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 16:49, 20 February 2015 (UTC)
 * I'm sorry, but I do not understand what you mean by 'interwiki links'. Are you trying to say that this bot will convert our links in such a way that they will be centralized so that any project can use the links? Can you show us a demo(for I am not sure of the benefits)?--Leaderboard (discuss • contribs) 09:49, 21 February 2015 (UTC)
 * I meant FooBar at end of the pages. This phase has been done in Wikipedia and there is a detailed help in English Wikipedia Ladsgroup (discuss • contribs) 10:32, 21 February 2015 (UTC)
 * From your response, I can get this probabilities of what you mean.
 * I think you are referring to the way we refer to something(by linking)on another wiki, like w:item. However , is Wikidata meant to extend this to languages like fr:Item for the French Wikibooks? How would it be for the French Wikipedia then?--Leaderboard (discuss • contribs) 12:47, 21 February 2015 (UTC)
 * @Leaderboard:
 * When you put wiki markup fr:foobar on a page, that creates a link to page "foobar" on the French Wikibooks. However, if you put foobar on the page, that doesn't create a link in the page content at all.  Instead, it creates an interwiki on the navigation bar at the left side of the page (assuming you aren't using the mobile interface): under "languages" on the left-hand nav bar, "French" is listed with a link there to page "foobar" on French Wikibooks.


 * Here's where Wikidata comes into it. There may be an item on Wikidata that links to a page here, and also links to page "foobar" on French Wikibooks.  The fact that both pages are linked from the same Wikidata item causes each of them to have an interwiki to the other, on the left-hand nav bar &mdash; except that if there is a local specification of an interwiki, such as foobar, that overrides anything on Wikidata.  However, the local specification only causes our page to have an interwiki to the page on French Wikibooks; it does not cause the page on French Wikibooks to automatically link back to our page.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 13:31, 21 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Hm... This bot isn't even approved and you just ran your bot. Don't think this bot was accepted/given the ok to do some edits at least... --atcovi (talk) 03:26, 26 February 2015 (UTC)
 * I have blocked the bot because it is doing exactly what I warned against earlier in this thread. As the bot is not flagged, every edit it makes results in a new unflagged revision being created requiring manual review. We have enough trouble with getting people to review revisions here as it is without a bot creating hundreds more. The bot will remain blocked until it is approved for the flag - which causes its revisions to not require manual review. QuiteUnusual (discuss • contribs) 15:13, 26 February 2015 (UTC)


 * See WB:Reading room/Proposals. (I admit I'm disappointed in the direction my attempt to discuss there with Romaine has taken, which I suspect isn't where either of us wanted it to go.)  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs)