Botwiki:Strategic planning

A page to post ideas for the long term viability of this project

Contents 1 Some initial thoughts 2 Some updated news 3 Answer 4 Further update

Some initial thoughts

Some initial thoughts: This project is dead to revitalize it we need to do several things but first decide what our mission is and that this project has continued relevance then we need to get people involved bot handlers script writers etc..

• We all know some even if we aren't ones ourselves we could at least ask them to post their most useful scripts here as a start.
• We need to cover not only wikipedia bot scripts but wikisource wiktionary etc commons - including upload bots bots that scrape images and text and place it on the wiki and at least discuss irc bots and other kinds of bots; meta has insufficient documentation of even pwb enwiki basically only replicates the meta info we need to clearly describe what needs to be done to make a bot work elsewhere such as a private wiki
• We need to ensure our scripts are relevant and up to date for things that don't need to be discussed we should link to the current version eg svn wikimedia org welcome py not python
• Welcome.py is the current version of the pwb script welcome py - our current featured script since september 2007 that script continues to reference here as the place to download the most current version
• In order to do these things we need more crats and more admins anyone who is reasonably well trusted on wmf projects should be opped shortly after arrival existing trusted users should be opped and notified of the action via e-mail
• We should consider moving to botwiki.net or botwiki.it I have secured the former for two years in case we want it
• We need to change the logo it still implies we are limited to pywikipedia a great and versatile tool but one that I think long ago was determined to be too narrow a scope for the project
• We need to upgrade from 1.11 to something a bit newer preferably 1.18 and we need a plan to make future upgrades and handle the set up of extensions as part of the above
• We should look long term towards an arrangement where more than one person can have shell access if not root

I'm sure there are more items but these are the ones that immediately come to mind I didn't number them because they aren't in priority order except for the first one -- Doug 19:58, 16 november 2011 (UTC)

Another thing we need to do is decide just what we will document and what we will leave for mediawiki to document as well as whether we want to take an active role as a community in organizing the information at mediawiki and migrating redirecting deleting the old information at meta as well as updating links at wikipedia and elsewhere -- Doug 20:09, 16 November 2011 (UTC)

Compare meta:Pywikipediabot with mw:pywikipediabot - most links on wikipedia link to the former -- Doug 23:48, 16 November 2011 (UTC)

The text above was recovered as it was not part of the database that was restored. I apologize for the lack of caps, spelling, formatting, I've fixed it as much as I could remember. Reply to follow. Snowolf ^{how can I help?} 15:54, 20 November 2011 (UTC)

Okey. All above sounds sensible and good to me. The wiki has been dormant for a few years. It was created as a platform for hosting scripts (mainly by Filnik, he did not have commit access yet) and testing bots (mainly for the itwiki community). Originally called fkregex, it has been thru a few name and url changes before, which explains some old pages pointing to the old urls/namespaces or being in Italian. I mainly provided the hosting and dealt with issues related to the wiki itself, as my bot-related expertise is limited at best, and only got worse in years of not running any. I have no issues with changing logo (just don't try to make me draw one, I can't :D), address or anything (tho I'd say it might be best to wait to see if the wiki is indeed revitalized before switching url, so as not to ask change an interwiki pointlessly, especially in the state of abandon that this wiki has been). It's always been policy to grant permissions to trusted users who require it. The whole "request to run a bot" policy was to stop certain users from running bots here, and require just a modicum of control, but it was always meant to be interpreted as "you want to run a bot? Sure, just ask somebody" rather than a enwiki-style approval process. The only point that is not feasible with the current platform is shell access. I can grant ftp/mysql access to others but not shell access, my hosting only allows one shell account, which is shared with the other websites I run. In any case, I have no issues keeping this project up to date in the future, the only reason I stopped doing so is that the project had pretty much died :) Extensions need to be obviously looked over, they're what felt needed at the time, and many moons have passed since. I'd really appreciate if everybody interested in revitalizing this project would let us know here what should be done with it :) In the meantime, I have given Doug sysop+crat+steward permissions on here. I'm of course open to give similar permissions (tho probably better to wait after the update) to all users trusted on wmf projects who wish to contribute here and need said permissions. Also, the permissions system will receive an overhaul once the update is done, for it was set up for different purposes than what would be required now. Please consider the project as starting again from pretty much scratch, but with a bit of content still in it, especially regarding policies and such, what's written at the moment is just what was written a long time ago, everything's easily modified :) I will write a few ideas of my own, tho mostly just extensions of what Doug has proposed above, over the next few days, of what I think might be useful. Also, once we update, I probably should fix the script I made a while ago to download scripts published on this wiki (writing it here more as a reminder to myself than to anybody else), and put it on the sidebar for I'm pretty sure only 3-4 people even know it exists/existed. Snowolf ^{how can I help?} 16:57, 20 November 2011 (UTC)

Some updated news

The site has been down for a few days. I have attempted an upgrade which didn't work out to well, resulting attempts to then restore the previous working version, which showed that the backup I made was unusable. I has now been restored with data from the last working backup, of the 12th of November. I apologize for this mess. I intend to still carry on the upgrading, but will do so gradually and with more care, as well as take a set of working backups before going thru this again, over the next few days. If at any time you see botwiki down or otheri ssues, #botwiki's topic should list the last status for it, manually updated if I do anything. Snowolf ^{how can I help?} 16:57, 20 November 2011 (UTC)

Answer

I have to tell you the truth: for me this site is almost dead and all the things that you have suggested are interested but useless to put some life again in the project. I was the main person working on it and I have new focuses now.

However, there aren't only bad news! I'm working in a new project that would be a lot more useful than botwiki, with manuals, scripts and everything useful to "hack" the wikis. If you are interested, please write me in private ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:EmailUser/Filnik ) I will give you further details. --Filnik 19:35, 20 November 2011 (UTC)

Further update

Notwithstanding Filnik's comments above, after discussing this in detail with Snowolf off-wiki, it looks like we are going to move forward with rebuilding this site to see what can be done and where things lead. I have started a subpage at /cleanup to list minor issues and questions that need to be resolved as part of a thorough scrubbing but, by themselves, appear fairly trivial - pages that I don't know what they are for, or where things were headed, so I don't want to delete them or disregard them entirely, but I don't think they are particularly helpful in their current form. I suggest major issues be discussed here and the details of existing pages be dealt with there. I think it's relevant to note that we have a lot of projectspace pages, many simply ported over from wikipedia, but few mainspace pages. I think we should consider what our mainspace and project space are for and how much project space stuff we really need.--Doug 09:04, 21 November 2011 (UTC)