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Requests for comment/Wikidata rollout and interwiki bots

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The following request for comments is closed. technical common sense measure to avoid waste of time and resources for bot owners. I'll notify people via bot owners' mailinglist--Vituzzu (talk) 16:04, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata has already been active for months but has not been linked to any other projects, this has allowed bots and users to gather all of the interwiki links that were already on the various wikipedia languages and add them to wikidata items, see d:Q1 and d:Q42 as examples. These pages now have most of the interwiki links that can be found on wikipedia projects. For a simple explanation of Wikidata, see w:en:WP:Wikidata (d:Q4847210).

Wikidata has now rolled out to all wikipedia languages thus the old style of interwiki bots that add links to article are now not needed. User:Addbot and User:Legobot are designed to remove interwiki links from articles to allow wikidata to take over providing links for articles but after running a few edits we cam across the same problem that we originally came accross on enwiki which was that interwiki bots would add these links back such as here.

I will send out a global message to all accounts with a global bot flag or that identify as an interwiki bot informing them of the wikidata rollout and what it means for them, based on the message enwiki used at w:en:User:Legoktm/Wikidata.

I also propose the locking of interwikibots that are still adding interwikilinks to any wikipedia language project. ( see #wikirc-iwconnect for a live feed of this).

·Add§hore· Talk To Me! 02:44, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Proposal

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As a temporary measure, any interwikibot that continues to add links that are present in Wikidata will be blocked and locked (if necessary) to prevent disruption. Bot owners will be given 24 hours after receiving the notice to disable the relevant bot task. After that, any steward may lock the account. Any bot owner can have their bot unlocked by contacting any steward after disabling the task. Bots that maintain interwiki links that cannot be stored in Wikidata, either for technical reasons or policy-based ones, are allowed to continue to operate normally, and should not be blocked/locked.

Support

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  1. ·Add§hore· Talk To Me! 02:44, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Legoktm (talk) 02:57, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  3. Support Support, and I think that we can do an injunctive response, until local communities indicate otherwise. The implementation of Wikidata and its general acceptance without any WPs wishing to be excluded, and after so many months of planning and implememtation, clearly is an implicit acceptance that this is the way forward, accordingly the edits should stop. We may have an issue if a bot does more than interwiki at the WPs, ie. sister wikis, or multiple tasks. Those bot operators should apply through standard means to have their bots released from a lock once they have disabled the problematic interwikis. — billinghurst sDrewth 03:02, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  4. Shanmugamp7 (talk) 03:10, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  5. Makecat 03:39, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  6. Support Support --Yurik (talk) 03:46, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  7. Support Support iXavier (talk) 03:48, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  8. Support Support --Rschen7754 04:03, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  9. Support Support with a few edits to clarify. Anyone can revert me if they disagree, but I think it's good to leave as little room as possible for error here. — PinkAmpers&(Je vous invite à me parler) 05:51, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  10. Support Support This seems to be reasonable proposal to prevent disruption to articles and duplication of effort. Callanecc (talk) 07:04, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  11. Support Support as necessary emergency measure. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 08:44, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  12. Support Support It was no fun to reset ~100 bot edits. --Murma174 (talk) 12:57, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  13. Support Support per Billinghurst Vogone talk 13:57, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  14. Support Support ✒ Bennylin 14:00, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  15. Support Support per Billinghurst. Lukas²³ (talk) 14:07, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  16. The project has to go on, edit wars with and by bots hurt the system! mabdul 15:06, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  17. Support Support  Ę-oиė  >>>  ™ 16:15, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  18. Support Support --KuboF (talk) 16:25, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose

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  1. Not in scope of block/lock, and there's no disruption at all. There's nothing special to do here, just inform the bot owners that they have to update pywikipediabot and everything will fix itself. We already got most bots updated when interwikis went live on it.wiki anyway, it wasn't hard. --Nemo 06:39, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    Disagree, interwikibots that are still adding links are practically performing cross wiki reverts of any removal of interwiki links, in my eyes this is disruption. ·Add§hore· Talk To Me! 13:58, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Comments

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  • I would propose that for an injunctive measure that this comment be opened for a short period, especially if the indications are from the community that this is an urgent and imperative measure. — billinghurst sDrewth 03:04, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • I think two days is a fair timeframe. It'll take months, if not years, to remove all the old interwiki links from the millions of articles available on the various editions of Wikipedia, so I think it's okay to wait 2 days before implementing a fairly drastic shift in policy (going from one of the only reasons you can be globally approved to being something you can be locked for...). — PinkAmpers&(Je vous invite à me parler) 05:47, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • I disagree. This isn't about bots interfering with removal, its about bots propagating incorrect links since they weren't programmed to deal with Wikidata. 2 days in bot land can be a lot of human cleanup... Legoktm (talk) 05:56, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    What does it mean "propagating incorrect links"? Won't the mistakes be automatically corrected after they stop by the same bots removing interwikis? --Nemo 06:43, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • I also disagree with PinkAmpersand - look at [1] and [2] - bots are fighting out - one removing the links, the other is re-adding them. In addition to potentially breaking interwiki maps, they create extra load on the servers. --Yurik (talk) 06:21, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The removing has already been started by various individuals, and even though I do think that we should wait it out, it might be easier to kill since they need to be killed anyway. --Yurik (talk) 06:21, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Both mine and Addshore's bots have been disabled on wikis that were just rolled out to. Legoktm (talk) 06:22, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • In the past hour+ of monitoring #wikirc-iw IRC channel, I saw these bots:
EmausBot 1150 Zorrobot 23 ZéroBot 796 Rezabot 11
Xqbot 474 MahdiBot 4 JackieBot 191 Liangent-bot 4
PixelBot 86 ChessBOT 3 LaaknorBot 42 Sz-iwbot 2
MerlIwBot 42 Xqbot 1 HRoestBot 30

Largest languages affected:

sv 444 fr 105
ceb 410 ca 66
nl 223 ko 61
vi 196 zh 55
ja 112 pt 55

--Yurik (talk) 07:25, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

  • Update: Apparently the #wikirc-iw has incorrect filter and includes some extra, non-intewiki links. The bots with fewer number of changes might not be interwiki and need to be double checked. --Yurik (talk) 08:26, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
German Wikipedia has blocked already half a dozen bots or so last night. Why discuss the issue? Be bold. --Matthiasb (talk) 08:25, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • First, please do not forget that Wikipedia is not the only WMF project. We need interwiki bots on Wikivoyage for instance, exactly because they add interlanguage links, and that was not easy to get them there.--Ymblanter (talk) 10:23, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Second, specifically for Wikipedia, users will still be adding interlanguage links to the articles - because they have never heard of Wikidata, because they do not know how to use Wikidata, because they find it more convenient, or for a thousand other reasons. It is important that these links get collected by bnots as well and make it to Wikidata.--Ymblanter (talk) 10:25, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Third, there are subsets of interlanguage links which are not appropriate for Wikidata, for example, sections of an article, or interwiki conflicts, or redirects, or whatever. Until we can reliable deal with them, I would object blocking interwiki bots for adding smth to the articles. I remember on Feb 22-23, when the bulk of removal was done on the English Wikipedia, I spent my entire time cleaning up after bots in the articles on my watchlist - in 50% cases for one or the other reason all links but one or two were removed, and I had to figure out why these stayed, fix it, go to Wikidata to include them, and then remove them finally from Wikipedia.--Ymblanter (talk) 10:28, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
This is not to stop interwiki bots in general, the proposal is clearly to stop interwiki bots that are duplicating data that is in Wikidata. So that means Wikipedias at this point of time. So to me that rules out the first point. This is not about users adding things, but specifically iwbots, which rules out the second point, and the bots will grab those links and manage them 'into' WD. Third point doesn't relate to our stopping the bots adding iw links. — billinghurst sDrewth 12:16, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
This is just to show the broader picture, and this is why my points are in the comment section and not in the oppose section. And the RFC is meaningless anyway since we have no authority to globally lock the bots, and for the rest each project decides for themselves. I believe on the English Wikipedia we only briefly blocked one bot, and only because the bot owner was traveling and could not be contacted for some time.--Ymblanter (talk) 12:21, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Then I propose that we lock the one account which appears to be causing issues still which is User:EmausBot the owner was notified ru:Обсуждение_участника:Emaus about needing to turn his bot off or make sure they update 2 days ago but the operator has been unresponsive. ·Add§hore· Talk To Me! 12:36, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
From what I see, he replied on that page at 11:50 saying that the update would take about a day and he does not mind that the bot is blocked on ru.wp before the update. I guess he would not mind the global lock either (assuming that the global lock does not prevent the update).--Ymblanter (talk) 13:04, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I really have a problem with this. During the night, I've gotten 4 requests to disable my bot until it is updated, and gotten several blocks, even though my bot is automatically updated before it starts it interwiki-run every 3 hours (which means that it is updated automatically 8 times every day, and it is the latest version when I'm checking this morning). When I started running my interwiki-bot, it was mostly a requirement for it to update once every day. According to SVN the change was deployed this night, so wait at least 24 hours before even thinking about blocking someone. Laaknor (talk) 11:23, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
It's not really a big deal if some bot gets blocked, once the issue is fixed, they can be unblocked. Snowolf How can I help? 11:33, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Also the number of bots now being affected by this is significantly lower than we first thought as it appears that many bots have indeed updated, currently on the irc feed I can just see HRoestBot and MerlIwBot still adding links.
Actually it seems to be the same number of bots just at a slower rate.. ·Add§hore· Talk To Me! 11:56, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
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