View source for Submissions:2023/Let's forbid single-maintainer bots and tools

{{WCNA 2023 Session Submission
|theme=Technology, Wild Ideas
|type=Roundtable
|abstract=It would be ludicrous if we said articles could only be updated by a single person, and if that person ever disappears, the article would need to be restarted from scratch.

Except we allow that for bots and tools. If there's a single maintainer that doesn't share their source code, when they disappear and it breaks, it often has to be restarted from scratch. Given that some of these are effectively mandatory for the health and success of Wikipedia, it's ludicrous too! So here's a wild idea - let's forbid any bot from being approved if it doesn't have at least 2 maintainers. And we'll apply the same to web tools hosted on Toolforge.

An introduction will briefly discuss the advantages in adopting such a policy and how it might work practically. Ideally the roundtable would discuss whether this is a good idea, what potential rebuttals would be, and how to actually implement such a radical shift in wiki policy. I would also be fine giving this as a straight lecture presentation.
|author=Kunal Mehta
|email=legoktm{{@}}debian.org
|username=Legoktm
|affiliates=Wikimedia New York City
|time=30-60 minutes
|presented=No
|livestream=Yes, you may livestream my session
|present-other=Yes
}}