Page values for "Submissions:2023/Let's forbid single-maintainer bots and tools"

Jump to navigation Jump to search

"2023_submissions" values

1 row is stored for this page
FieldField typeValue
titleStringLet's forbid single-maintainer bots and tools
statusStringDeclined
themeStringTechnology, Wild Ideas
typeStringRoundtable
abstractWikitext

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 recreated 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.

authorStringKunal Mehta
emailList of Email, delimiter: ,legoktm@debian.org
usernameStringLegoktm
affiliatesStringWikimedia New York City
timeString30-60 minutes
requestsWikitext
presentedWikitext

No

livestreamBooleanYes
videoString