Gebanibespik:Leptictidium
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Glidis! Spelob, das ojuitol keblünami Vükipede obsik. If labol säkis u dotis, kanol säkön guvani: ,IJzeren Jan’ ‹ u votiks. Dunabikos binon mödik! If vilol lärnön mödikumosi dö Volapük it, reidolös padi: VP:VOLAPUK.
¡Hola! Esperamos que te guste mucho contribuir a nuestra Wikipedia. Si tienes preguntas o problemas, puedes pedir ayuda a los administradores IJzeren Jan y otros. ¡Hay mucho que hacer! Si quieres saber más sobre Volapük, mira VP:VOLAPUK.
--Malafaya 18:19, 30 dekul 2007 (UTC)
The uses of bots
[redakön fonäti]Oi Leptictidium! Thanks for not starting Closure III: The Mission on Meta. It's too much stress... and I have a little daughter who needs attention too.
Now, on to bots:
1. Using bots to maintain thousands of articles -- especially infobox data -- is, I think, accepted by everybody? Even the German Wikipedia uses bots to e.g. change population figures after more recent data from the German Gemeinde become available (if I understand it correctly, there's one change scheduled for this year around June or July). They are also used without any protest -- consensus uses you could name that -- for correcting spelling and grammar mistakes, for adding interwiki links, links to other available pages (e.g. turning years into links to years -- 1492 into 1492). I, of course, agree that this is a useful way to use bots; but I think you won't have anything to argue here, because there's no controversy; everybody -- even Arnomane! -- will, I think, immediately agree.
2. Bot usage guidelines: isn't this what Yekrats had proposed -- the m:Proposal for Policy on overuse of bots in Wikipedias. Are you thinking of something along these lines? I note that the most frequently stated opinion is that bot usage policies are wiki-internal affairs. Just like wiki philosophies like m:inclusionism or m:exclusionism cannot be made into cross-project WMF policies -- they must be debated by the users within every project -- so should, I think, general guidelines on bot usage: let every community decide for themselves what they think is good. Each will be a different experiment, and we can later compare the good and bad sides of their results.
You know what I think would be a good idea, especially for beginning projects? If someone wrote a guide to 'what we expect from a Wikipedia community'. What are the tasks that new projects should attack first? Which other tasks come later? Someone could start an article with a title like: "Building a Wikipedia" and fill it with all kinds of advice for new projects. Whether they should be "policy" and enforced across projects is a different question; but if such an article were well written and full of useful tips and solutions, I'm sure it would be quite influential. Among other things, it would discuss the pros and cons of bot use for various purposes.
Now, on the question of freeing humans to improve more interesting articles: in principle I also agree. Someone has to do the bots, and this takes time and work (I wished bot critics would realize that! Some of them speak as if bots wrote and ran themselves...). But then again, this is true for every task in Wikipedias. Someone has to write the 'support' pages (in the "Wikipedia:" namespace): guidelines, general explanations of what Wikipedia is, help pages... and doing this also takes time and diverts people from more interesting articles. Yet it is necessary. The same goes for e.g. category structure, templates, and even user talk pages :-)... One has to think about how to divide up one's time between the tasks that need to be done; and, before that, one must make one's mind about which tasks should be done. I would claim (for the reasons I mention in Yekrats' proposal page) that the geography stubs are worthy of time and work. And I'm ready and willing to discuss that! :-)