Wikipedia talk:Bot policy

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Venue change for bot appeals and reexaminations

The current policy (Wikipedia:Bot policy#Appeals and reexamination of approvals) requires bot approval appeals to take place at Wikipedia talk:Bots/Requests for approval. I would like to change this venue to the Wikipedia:Bot owners' noticeboard to keep in in line with other issues that are discussed there, and to ensure a larger audience. I'm fine with leaving a requirement to send "notice" to WT:BRFA of such discussions. Any thoughts on this proposed change? — xaosflux ^Talk 18:56, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

Sensible. –xeno^talk 21:16, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

It's something I've been meaning to tackle for a while. To me it doesn't​ make sense to have this in the BRFA page, but i never could decide between creating a de-BRFA process, or something else. Having the discussion at BOTN makes perfect sense though. I'd be for that. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 23:27, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

Support. It should be specified whether existing discussions should be moved or not (if this is enacted). I support moving ongoing discussions while leaving a notice of the move behind. Larger audiences are always good. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 22:39, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

• Baring any new comments I'm going to adjust this soon, note there is no change to the process - only the page. — xaosflux ^Talk 14:42, 28 May 2017 (UTC)

I've updated the page to say WP:BOTN. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 02:22, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

History

Historically, being flagged as a bot account was distinct from the approval process; not all approved bots had that property. This stemmed from the fact that all bot edits were hidden from recent changes, and that was not universally desirable. Now that bot edits can be allowed to show up on recent changes, this is no longer necessary.

It is not my recollection that "all bot edits were hidden from recent changes". Comments?

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 10:27, 28 May 2017 (UTC).

It looks like RecentChanges had a 'hidebot' option as far back as the initial revision checked into SVN, although the watchlist didn't get such an option until August 2005 at the earliest.

But given the timing of the change to make flagging non-optional, it seems more likely that Dycedarg was mistaken in adding that text: rather than becoming non-optional due to a change in whether bot-changes are shown, it became non-optional because of the then-recent addition of the ability for a flagged bot to not flag edits. This old discussion seems to support that. Anomie⚔ 11:26, 28 May 2017 (UTC)

Obvious mistake

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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I just fixed an obvious mistake in COSMETICBOT. "Visible" can't be right. We have bots that add date parameters, etc. -- Magioladitis (talk) 00:00, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

I've undone that edit. Those bots have explicit approval to do these activities. Primefac (talk) 00:02, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

Primefac Exactly. So in general these edits are not considered "cosmetic". This policy applies to bots. -- Magioladitis (talk) 00:03, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

Primefac You should know that all bots need explicit approval. -- Magioladitis (talk) 00:04, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

Anomie why don't you let more editors to comment on this? Right now the trick some people use to jump in every discussion, claim the matter is "obvious" and do not let more members of the community to participate. Right now, we have a policy what changes by consensus instead of a policy that reflects consensus. -- Magioladitis (talk) 14:17, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

Because there's nothing that needs to be commented on here except for your misjudgement in making such a poor edit. I don't really want to have to have a discussion about topic-banning you from bot-related discussions for continuing to make disruptive edits, comments, and proposals, but for that you'll need to stop doing so. Anomie⚔ 14:34, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

Seconded. This is becoming very WP:IDIDNTHEARTHAT. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 14:36, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

Anomie I try to understand why my opinion on bot editing should be banned. Especially, when the policy recently changed exactly due to my comments and editing. I have contributed heavily in forming today's policy. -- Magioladitis (talk) 14:37, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

Headbomb Wikipedia works by consensus (See Wikipedia:BOLD, revert, discuss cycle). I do not plan to stop until consensus is achieved. Wikipedia has hundreds of editors. I want to inform about a consensus that changed to disallow working bots and kicked editors out of Wikipedia. -- Magioladitis (talk) 14:39, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Replace cosmetic with a less misleading name

Moved from User talk:Anomie/Sandbox2. Anomie⚔ 12:37, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

One of the problems of the cosmetic bot policy is that we use the word cosmetic to mean the opposite of its real world meaning. In the real world a change that didn't alter the meaning of anything but subtly changed its visual appearance would be considered a cosmetic change. The equivalent of refreshing lipstick or dabbing on some rouge. In wiki speak it is almost the opposite, a change that doesn't have any visible effect is described as cosmetic. I suspect some of the conflict about what is and is not a cosmetic edit is from editors who have taken a commonsense real world view as to what cosmetic means rather than read the policy. So if we are going to review and redefine cosmetic now would be a good time to replace it with a word such as trivial or invisible. Since a change to alt text or a subtle change of hue so that a table made sense to people with colour blindness might be invisible to most of us but nonetheless a useful edit, invisible wouldn't always be the right word, so I suggest we define and deprecate "trivial" edits. ϢereSpielChequers 20:32, 11 June 2017 (UTC)

This draft has been RFC'd and adopted. The live version is at WP:COSMETICBOT. If you have issues and suggestions with the adopted wording, the place to raise it is at WT:BOTPOL. But I don't see how cosmetic changes to the wikitext makes things unclear. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 23:43, 11 June 2017 (UTC)

I'd say these changes are often cosmetic from the point of view of the person viewing the wiki source. I'm not saying we should be using words in a policy that are defined in terms of how the wiki source looks, rather than how the rendered article looks; I'm just guessing that might be why the word was chosen originally. Jc3s5h (talk) 13:29, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

"Non-rendered edits" would be clearer and more verbally precise. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 13:43, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

True, but WP:NONRENDEREDBOT is a bit wordier (and a bit harder to read). At the very least, COSMETICBOT gives some indication of the type of edit. Primefac (talk) 13:46, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

How about visual changes? The shortcut would be WP:VISUALBOT. TheMagikCow (T) (C) 15:12, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

Straightforward and clear. I like it. Primefac (talk) 15:13, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

It could work, but it suffers from a similar problem: what we are trying to proscribe is "non-visual" (i.e. invisible) changes. All of the "not" statements would have to be reversed, since what we want is visual changes, and the current language is about prohibiting "cosmetic" changes. Not a big deal, but someone would have to propose a rewrite. It's not just a drop-in change of wording.

There may be a single word that can replace "cosmetic" that means what we want: "changes that do not affect the rendered output." I can't think of that word right now, but I think it exists. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:18, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

At one point we have to recognize that Wikipedia has terms of art, and I'd surmise that if you don't understand the concept of cosmetic edits as used by the Wikipedian community, you probably shouldn't be operating a bot on Wikipedia. A "cosmetic edit", as far as the Wikipedia community is concerned, is an edit that makes the edit window prettier, but which otherwise doesn't substantially change the rendered page. We also give a list of changes typically considered substantial. If there is still confusion about what is or is not considered cosmetic, it's not inverting the explanation from what cosmetic edits are not and define them explicitly (which can't be done) rather than by contrast that will solve the issue. If there is a specific question about specific edits, the policy is to ask for clarification and BAG will give their opinion, and if needed, serve an an mediators between bot operators and editors with concerns of violations. If something is controversial, we'll ask for an RFC. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 19:05, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

I don't doubt the bot operators understand what we mean by cosmetic edits. I'm not convinced that their critics do, and I think a name that means the same in the real world as on wiki would reduce tensions ϢereSpielChequers 19:36, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

If they don't know what it is, then they can be pointed to WP:COSMETICBOT which explains it. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 21:44, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

Just to respond to Primefac, the shortcut could be anything. WP:NRBOT is shorter than WP:COSMETICBOT and no less intuitive than WP:AIV, WP:RFPP, WP:RFA, etc. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 13:43, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

Maybe try a different approach?

I think the community is ready to completely remove the entire section. We already have many bots working on maintenance without any further prerequisites. I am glad to read that the word "cosmetic" is not clear. -- Magioladitis (talk) 14:13, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

We had an RFC that closed with "a clear consensus exists to adopt the proposed language" not even a month ago. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 14:16, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

Headbomb True. It was a big step forward to make clearer that some edits may not change the "Visual output" but they may still be useful and at the same time disconnect the policy form an old python script. Stepping o this I suggest that we should not move to the other direction and instead reject bots byt a policy that changes by consensus to allow bot proposals and judge afterwards if they are worth to be done as tasks or not. The idea of requiring "another more important edit" before an edit is done is not working in practice. Who is actually doing it? -- Magioladitis (talk) 14:21, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

"Not working in practice" - Then fix your bots. Pretty much everyone else is doing it without issues. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 14:22, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

Headbomb The only way to achieve this is to demand an AWB to run with general fixes on which is not actually happening with very few exceptions. I am not even aware of bot combining tasks at the moment. Are you sure that the other AWB bot owners actually use general fixes in addition to a different task? -- Magioladitis (talk) 14:23, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

I am, for one. See MinusBot (talk · contribs), or CitationCleanerBot (talk · contribs) for instance. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 14:24, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for letting me know. I am still not satisfied by the number of "minor errors" fixed per day. -- Magioladitis (talk) 14:29, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

The previous RfC was a good start against all those that completely disagree with edits that do not change the visual output. Now it's time for a more decisive action i order to reflect the real consensus. -- Magioladitis (talk) 14:41, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

Because, after this period there should an aftermath. 35,000 unfixed pages maybe have thought us a lesson. -- Magioladitis (talk) 14:47, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

Magio, WP:DROP it. 1) The RFC reflects the 'real consensus'. 2) Several of those 35,000 fixes are extremely-low priority fixes that do not change anything in how the the actual page, and does not concern anything that is actually broken. 3) I have spent months trying to get you to fix those things that everyone agree are actually broken and needs fixing, and even updated the WP:CWERRORS table to make which fixes are considered cosmetic and which are not crystal clear to you and others. You can even sort them by priority, and by whether or not they are cosmetic. If 35,000 unfixes pages somehow offends you, you have a path to reduce that number by a significant amount. Bitching about you being unable to fix [Error 2], of which there is currently only 1 instance, on your own, will do nothing to reduce that 35000 number. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 14:54, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

Headbomb how did we end up having a backlong in high priority errors too? Who is responsible for that? I recently came across another discussion of an admin complaining to an editor because the editor was fixing pages in maintenance categories. Or recently I was advised that when a bot clogs I should use the nobots tag by the very same people who without reporting bugs played key role against bot editing. -- Magioladitis (talk) 17:14, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

I'm not sure I understand the question? I have a backlog? If you mean the checkwiki stuff, I suspect that has to do with either a lack of participation, the loss of bgwhite, or refinements to CW logic that now catches more instance of issues. One thing it doesn't have a thing to do with is WP:COSMETICBOT, since those fixes aren't cosmetic. For the rest, you're asking me to comment on things I no nothing about. I don't know what conversations you're referring to, concerning what edits, or what the nobots thing has to do with anything. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 17:18, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

I still would like an investigation to what led to Bgwhite's loss. I did not get satisfying answers of how certain people may haave led to that. Anyway. this is offtopic but at some the commuity has to inestigate that. -- Magioladitis (talk) 11:35, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

If you want to know why bgwhite is gone, send them an email. From my recollection, they simply lost their patience with the ARBCOM case. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 11:43, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

Which could be summarised as "hostile editing environment", I think. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 10:28, 17 June 2017 (UTC).

Should bots perform multiple edits in a page?

In continuation to this discussion Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 137#Should bots perform secondary "cosmetic" tasks while making a primary task? it's a good question whether we should work in a direction of where a bot should perform secondary valuable tasks or not. Right now some bot owners that use AWB deny to enable general fixes which causes many issues to remain unfixed while they could be fixedin a single run making bot editing really optimal and concrete. -- Magioladitis (talk) 21:39, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

To be very clear, are you proposing that bot operators may enable secondary tasks without approval, may enable secondary tasks with specific approval, or are required to enable secondary tasks? These are three very different things and it isn't clear from your question which you're advocating for. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 22:07, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

To your third point: I don't think we require operators to do any "extra" (non-required by their approved task) editing they don't want to do. — xaosflux ^Talk 23:11, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

I'll repeat what I said last time, because nothing changed since then.

"But to answer the question directly, WP:COSMETICBOT is clear that bots can perform cosmetic fix alongside more substantial edits, that bots can be approved to do genfixes following a proper BRFA, and that some but not all of the checkwiki/genfixes are considered non-cosmetic and can be done own their own. As for asking bots to do AWB genfixes, I suppose you can ask, but no bot operator can be compelled to do them. And of course any bot op that chooses to do AWB genfixes alongside their main task is required to go through a BRFA for approval."

Now you say "some bot owners that use AWB deny to enable general fixes". This is not a problem related to WP:BOTPOL, that's bot operator choice. Feel free to ask bot operators to enable WP:AWB genfixes, either directly or at WP:BOTN, but whether or not to do so will remain a bot operator choice, subject to BRFA approval, and nothing that will even be enshrined in policy. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 02:18, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

Headbomb That's the problem. It's not about choice otherwise some errors will never be fixed. -- Magioladitis (talk) 09:46, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

Xaosflux exactly we don't require them to do anything and in the contrary to bot owners that want to do the general fixes we require them to do something else. This is unbalance that leads to unfixed errors. -- Magioladitis (talk) 09:48, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

@Magioladitis: Most bot frameworks don't even have "general fixes" as a concept, so requiring all bots to do it would never fly. — xaosflux ^Talk 11:04, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

Xaosflux true and that is reason of an inbalance. The way I see it is that we either stop complaining for bots maintance tasks or we find a way to combine actions. Right now we still have questioning whther adding/remving a pages from a cleanp cateory is a valid bot bot or not. -- Magioladitis (talk) 11:33, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

If some "errors" like <i>Italics</i> don't get fixed to ''Italics'', it's really not the end of the world since the visual output is completely unaffected. "In the contrary to bot owners that want to do the general fixes we require them to do something else." is patently false. People are certainly free to make bots that address specific errors like CW Error #03 or CW Error #86 (provided they go through BRFAs). What they can't do is bots that solely fixes CW Error #38 or CW Error #65 for instance. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 11:52, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

The only point I'm stressing is that it should continue to be fine for a bot to not make every possibly improvement to a page when they edit, for an extreme example I don't want to see ClueBot NG being stopped because it won't also go "fix" things unrelated to its task - especially "cosmetic" things like changing [[article|article]] --> [[article]] when it is making an edit. — xaosflux ^Talk 13:09, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

ClueBot NG doesn't even submit edits, so it wouldn't even be able to do so. ClueBot NG submits rollbacks, and just sends a revision ID and edit summary. And incorporating miscellaneous fixes in the User Talk page edits seems like a lot of work for very little return. Furthermore, in general, bot edits that do lots of things make for very confusing diffs, and more difficult to understand edit summaries (to the point that many simply give up on producing a decent edit summary and instead simply mention their BRFA or user page for a detailed explanation of what all they do). Software, including bots, should do one thing, and do it well^[1][2] -- Cobi^(t|c|b) 23:53, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

In general, I would argue that bot tasks should be limited to the changes specifically approved in the BRFA. The purpose of a BRFA is to document exactly what the bot task will do, and in principle it should be possible for someone to verify that each bot edit for a particular task matches the BRFA. So any "secondary" edits should be explicitly listed in the BRFA. One system that would not work would be for bot operators to be able to add any additional "secondary" task that they like to existing approved bot tasks. The way to avoid that is for the operators to include the desired edits in the BRFA, or submit a revised BRFA if the edits associated with a particular task should be revised. — Carl (CBM · talk) 12:30, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

I completely agree that we should not mandate bot owners into putting general fixes into their bot. This is an extra layer of complexity that could stop important tasks, as Xaosflux has mentioned above. We don't want to put off important tasks for trivial ones. If bot owners would like to do cosmetic tasks as the same time as a major task, I have no problem with that, in particular, as long as it has been approved in the BRFA. The BRFA is there to show what the bot is approved to do. Anything outside that scope is breaking the BRFA and therefore an unauthorised task. The BRFA holds owners accountable for their actions, and without mentioning the tasks we lead down a slippery slope of so-called secondary tasks that don't need approval. Also, not all bots with be appropriate for these genfixes at the same time. Bots with already complex tasks that produce complex edit diffs should probably not be further complicated. As long as the approval goes the normal way, I don't have a problem with asking owners to do it. Should we mandate it? No. TheMagikCow (T) (C) 13:41, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

This discussion seems like a complete misunderstanding of the question posed by Magioladitis. Let me rephrase and see if we can gain traction. Given that:

1. There are many small fixes which have consensus.
2. Some bot frameworks have support for such things, the best known being AWB and Pywikibot.

should we force, encourage, allow, discourage or disallow the use of such extensions?

It seems to me that no-one has suggested that we should force their use - this is a straw man proposal we can dispose of immediately.

Certainly the attitude many Wiki-gnomes have taken in the past is that there are tasks we can, at least for the first 80%, delegate to AWB users (both bots and humans) to reduce the number of gnoming edits required.

And again the general feeling in the bot community and BAG was certainly, for some years, to allow the inclusion of AWB "general fixes" as performing an en passant improvement to pages while another edit was taking place.

So far so good. However as a bot-runner it is much easier to turn off General Fixes, especially when one is faced with argumentative and disruptive editors. Stating our support for the idea of making as much improvement per-edit as conveniently possible is a good idea.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 10:23, 17 June 2017 (UTC).

It doesn't seem quite that clear-cut to me. When Magioladitis uses languages like "deny to enable", "It's not about choice", and "exactly we don't require them to do anything", that sounds very much like advocating what you claim is a strawman. BU Rob13 asked for specific clarification as to what exactly was being proposed, but unfortunately has not received a reply as of yet. Anomie⚔ 13:47, 17 June 2017 (UTC)

My view is that we should still allow these edits, on a case-by-case basis. The BRFA must include the edits in the request, and it is not always suitable for every bot (see above comments). As long as the BRFA has approved it, that's fine, and if the owner refuses, that's fine too. What I don't want to see is unapproved edits being made, even if they are genfixes, as this leads to a situation where it gets hard to define what is and is not ok to run as a secondary task. TheMagikCow (T) (C) 12:14, 17 June 2017 (UTC)

@Rich Farmbrough: "Stating our support for the idea of making as much improvement per-edit as conveniently possible is a good idea."

This very much depends on the bot. I don't support ClueBot making such improvements, for instance. I'm not aware of anyone that thinks genfixes in addition to the bot's main task isn't allowed, provided of course it's part of the task as described in the the BRFA, and if those editors exist, you can send them at WP:BOTN, or point them to the bot's BRFA. But that's a bit of a misrepresentation of the issues that normally arises with genfixes, and that is to not make cosmetic edits with bots. There are a handful of genfixes which are miscategorized as non-cosmetic/non-minor. That's on the AWB team to fix, of which Magioladitis is part of. Whether or not those are problem for bots depend on the bot. Most issues can be avoided by simply enabling the skip conditions and an intelligent selection of articles on which to run the bot on. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 15:30, 17 June 2017 (UTC)

Anomie I ask to require bot owners to do more in a signle edit the same way it is required(?) for some valid edits to be done only in addition to other edits. -- Magioladitis (talk) 22:58, 17 June 2017 (UTC)