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All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part XX
RE: All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part XX (Postmortem on Gethbot July 13 screwup)
(07-13-2021, 09:19 AM)Bob Schroeck Wrote: Oh, okay.  No prob then.  God knows, when I was using a bot to do mass changes a few years back I had my share of coding issues and errors I had to fix by hand after the fact, so I'm not going to give you any crap over that.

On July 13th, Gethbot (my bot account) made some automated fixes that wound up screwing up more than they fixed. I have, by hand, rolled all those edits back to their antebellum condition before the incident.

That said, this was my mistake, and I own that. Any punishment or penalty deemed appropriate I accept without issue, I take full responsibility for my errors.

That said, I propose we have some new rules for our bot policy going forward.

1. No matter who owns a bot account or the nature of the edits intended, all bots not running regular services (as in, constant) of a known nature (like InternetArchiveBot) must have the bot owner submit all technical information requested on the proposed fixes, including their specific changes in all details and the scope of pages, categories and namespaces affected. All staff must approve of these changes or at least a majority. This applies to all bot jobs done on an "as needed" basis. No "ex post facto" justification is allowed for any ATT user, all proposed changes must be agreed upon by staff consensus at a bare minimum PRIOR to the bot job duration.

For constantly running bot services providing ongoing service of known useful utility, such as preventing link rot and other preapproved tasks, they will otherwise be exempt from this policy until such time they need to modify it to do services outside the pre-approved remit they were authorized, in which instance they must still submit all needed information for prior staff approval before it will be allowed to proceed in either the short or long-term.

2. No "generalized fixes" that would damage ISO standard dating, American/British spelling, or any other changes like that provided by our existing page templates can be allowed. The only exceptions are those agreed on as necessary by appropriate review prior and even then the scope must be strictly circumscribed in accordance with bot policy.

3. If a bot causes an issue, the bot owner is fully responsible for fixing all mistakes made in good faith. Confirmed malicious use of a bot for any reason is immediate grounds for the permanent expulsion of the bot owner and their bot account from All The Tropes. As for good-faith mistakes, they must still be immediately subject to any penalties deemed appropriate by the staff of ATT, depending on the difficulty of repairing the scope of any damage. Any staff who have made either good-faith or malicious mistakes are not exempt by any means, they must suffer the consequences the same as any other user depending on the nature of the damage, how easily it was reversible, done, and intention.

Note, if such penalties include a temporary block from using ATT services, the bot owner must still be obligated to fix any mistakes they made, if feasible and appropriate, before the imposition of such a penalty, but only if the bot owner made the mistakes in legitimate good faith. Malicious use will not allow for this and should be fixed by staff.

4. If the bot uses an automated wiki tool like PyWikipediaBot, AutoWikiBrowser, or Perl's MediaWiki bot script (among other tools), none of their built-in functions that provide "generalized" fixes based on Wikipedia's specific standards can be allowed, unless none of those would break any of the aforementioned rules or any existing mandated ATT template and page code, and any purposeful circumvention of this after the adoption of this rule will be considered the same as malicious vandalism and be dealt with as specified in the previous rule.

5. Archival records may be requested and made available for all bot jobs done on an "as needed" basis and will be archived in a place mutually decided on by staff that are visible to all ATT users, in the interests of transparency, barring certain jobs done for technical or legal reasons that may involve private information or other legal situations that require confidentiality.

6. Miraheze staff are the only parties who, for technical and legal reasons, are allowed to circumvent any of the above since they are the owners of our current hosting service, and if any of our rules conflict with theirs, then theirs take precedent.

If anyone has further suggestions to make sure all bot use going forward prevents further incident, I heartily endorse it and would be willing to set an example by being the first party subjected to any penalty for this recent incident. My intentions were in good faith and were fixable, but they still caused issues, and thus whenever these rules are finalized or not, I still wish to set an example of being responsible for my error in this incident.


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RE: All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part XX (Postmortem on Gethbot July 13 screwup) - by GethN7 - 07-13-2021, 10:28 AM

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