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The following discussion is preserved as an archive of a successful request for Bot Approvals Group membership. Please do not modify it.

BAG Nomination: ProcrastinatingReader

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Hi everyone! Since I often see the BAG overloaded, and it's not unusual for requests to wait a long time for action, I'd like to volunteer myself to help keep BRFA flowing. It's important work and I feel I'd be good at it, so here I am.

I understand a BAG member needs two key qualities: the technical expertise to judge the soundness of a bot, and a good understanding of community norms and the bot policy to evaluate the consensus for one.

For the technical part, most of my on-wiki activity is in the areas of bots and templates. I've been through BRFA half a dozen times with my bot, and off-wiki have a CS background. I'm also familiar with most of the common programming languages used to develop bots. For the latter, I've been active in helping out at BRFAs and WP:BOTREQ in the past few months, providing gentle advice and picking out possible issues. I'm also used to evaluating consensus when patrolling TPERs, closing TfDs (~150-200 closed to date), and the odd RfC.

I've recently reviewed WP:BOTPOL and WP:BAGG. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 01:50, 17 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Questions

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  • 1: What are your views on whether source code of bots should be made public? – SD0001 (talk) 18:06, 17 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    I'm a fan of open source code. I think software would be very different today (in a bad way) if folks took a different approach to OS and things like GitHub didn't exist. On Wikipedia, I think it should be encouraged but not required. It's not uncommon for botops to leave or become inactive and bots to end up with no active maintainer. Having source code public means continuity is easier (verses someone having to recode the tool from scratch), and it means people can find bugs and add features even when botops are somewhat active, but cannot get around to the task themselves. I think greater collaboration in the area of bots would be a plus in many ways.
    For the not required part, there's a couple of reasons I hold that view. The first, and most common I suspect, is that botops haven't yet found the time (or are too lazy) to clean up their code to make it neat enough (in their eyes), and to remove any credentials lingering around in history and whatnot. I don't think it's worth holding up an otherwise OK BRFA until the botop finds time to do that. The second is security concerns, e.g. User:ProcseeBot. A third, less common one, is that some bots could be sufficiently advanced to have commercial value and/or the main developers could be external (eg User:SuggestBot). I know we have an ethos on open-source collaboration, but historically it hasn't been applied to bots in the same way, and I don't personally believe it's worth possibly limiting our selection of bots for that sake. SuggestBot is open source in this case, but it's the same principle. If a university or company wants to commercialise their work but is willing to offer it to Wikipedia for free, I don't personally see that as being exceptional compared to eg CVDetector using Google's proprietary APIs.
    If you're asking about ProcBot specifically, open sourcing it at some point is indeed on my todo list (it isn't done already due to point #1). ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 18:31, 17 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

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The above BAG membership discussion is preserved as an archive of the discussion. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the talk page of either this nomination or the nominated user). No further edits should be made to this page.
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