The following discussion is an archived debate. Please do not modify it. To request review of this BRFA, please start a new section at WT:BRFA. The result of the discussion was Request Expired.

Bot0612 10[edit]

Operator: Firefly (talk · contribs · SUL · edit count · logs · page moves · block log · rights log · ANI search)

Time filed: 00:14, Wednesday, June 6, 2018 (UTC)

Automatic, Supervised, or Manual: automatic

Programming language(s): Python

Source code available: https://github.com/rwjuk/g13bot_tools_new

Function overview: Take over HasteurBot's G13 nudging and tagging role as said bot is now inactive.

Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate): https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Articles_for_creation&diff=prev&oldid=844237355

Edit period(s): As before, triggered every 4 hours (may reduce to 12 now that backlog is clearing)

Estimated number of pages affected: ~100 pages per day (going by HasteurBot's edits)

Exclusion compliant (Yes/No): No

Already has a bot flag (Yes/No): Yes

Function details: The functionality will be identical to that described in HasteurBot's BRFA, save the following:

Discussion[edit]

@Xaosflux: Not really, for two reasons. (1) The actions of the bot haven't been brought up in the discussion, despite its original operator participating. Of course, it's entirely possible that some participants aren't aware of its existence. I can mention this BRFA there as an 'FYI'. (2) At present there appears to be a rough consensus opposing the use of ((promising draft)) to prevent G13 deletion, which would have no impact on bot operations. If a consensus develops (here or at any point in the future) that the template should in fact prevent G13, it would be trivial to check a page for this before nudging or nominating.
I see that discussion as being more about what happens before G13 (i.e. at what point a draft becomes eligible), rather than what happens when G13 kicks in. Once a draft is G13 eligible any editor can apply the tag - the bot simply automates this process, and is strictly limited to filling the G13 category to 50 items every 4 hours. ƒirefly ( t · c · who? ) 18:44, 6 June 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]
I think that's worth a typed-in thank you. Thank you! Thincat (talk) 21:05, 6 June 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • {rto|Thincat)) G13 is applicable regardless of surviving a recent deletion discussion. Once a page is MFDed or AFDed we don't permanantly immunize it against CSDs. This should not be added @Firefly: as it is not in any policy. Hasteur (talk) 23:39, 6 June 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • Hasteur is correct. There's a longstanding consensus that drafts have a significantly lower bar for being kept than articles do. As a result, drafts are usually only deleted at MfD if they're promotional, attack pages/verging on BLP issues, totally not suitable for WP, or being tendentiously submitted without improvement and wasting peoples' time (in other words, if they are so bad as to necessitate deletion before G13 kicks in).
  • Most other draft MfDs, even if the draft is crap, are kept or closed as no-consensus. Very often, the fact that G13 will cause the draft to "expire" eventually is taken into account when people !vote at MfD. You'll see keep comments that say something like, "keep and allow author to continue working, no reason to delete before G13 kicks in." That doesn't mean those drafts are necessarily good topics or promising drafts. It means that they're not bad enough to require deletion now instead of G13 later. And of course the MfD resets the G13 clock, so any draft that isn't deleted at MfD gets another 6 months to be worked on anyway.
  • If you suddenly begin to exclude those drafts from bot-performed G13 tagging, you remove that nuance from MfD and force discussions there to be more black and white. I think an undesired result would be that more drafts will wind up deleted at MfD outright, rather than closed as keep/no consensus pending improvement with their G13 timer reset, which of course is counter-intuitive if your intention is to preserve more draft content. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 00:55, 7 June 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]
To the extent that some pages are kept at MfD because of the future availability of G13, these are the sorts of pages that could be tagged for G13 by hand. (There shouldn't be that many of them, in any event.) Calliopejen1 (talk) 16:36, 7 June 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]
With all due respect, Calliopejen1, until G13 changes your opinion doesn't matter. If you think a page should be kept, make a null edit every five months. There are already a half-dozen discussions about changing G13, and this BRFA is not (and should not) be one of those. The bot should run with the restrictions given by the current guidelines, amended IIf it becomes necessary down the line. Primefac (talk) 16:39, 7 June 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]
The state of policy as to G13 is not entirely settled. When G13 was extended to non-AfC drafts, a simultaneous discussion concluded that pages tagged with the promising-draft template "should go to WP:MFD instead of being deleted G13". Now that appears to be changing, as I freely admit. However, the community has not yet considered whether G13 should apply to a draft that has previously survived an MfD. This would be the next logical question given the change in policy as to the promising draft template. I don't think it is obvious that a page should be WP:CSD eligible where a community discussion (presumably regarding the same basis as the G13 tag--i.e. should we just let it sit around?) has concluded that it should not be deleted. I would like to bring this issue at WT:CSD, but I would like to wait until the current promising-draft discussion is settled to do so. In the meantime, it seems reasonable not to have a bot operating on the cutting edge of Wikipedia policy.
I'm entirely happy to put this on hold until the discussion around ((promising draft)) is closed. ƒirefly ( t · c · who? ) 16:59, 7 June 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]
@Firefly: I was hoping to have a separate discussion about MFD-keeps and G13 after the promising-draft discussion is closed. The discussion is already confusing enough, and I don't want to put forward a harder-to-understand conditional proposal (if the discussion above concludes in X way, should we Y?). I believe that the issue will be easier to consider for all involved once promising-draft is resolved. Could we wait for the conclusion of my discussion to come (as well) before the bot applies G13 to previously kept drafts? If I lose, of course, I have no objection to having the bot implement whatever policy consensus there is. Calliopejen1 (talk) 17:06, 7 June 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]
@Calliopejen1: I understand - could you link me to that discussion? I can't recall seeing it. I'm happy to postpone until that discussion runs its course. Just to confirm, you're happy for the bot to run, but to leave previously-kept-at-MfD drafts alone until the discussion concludes - correct? ƒirefly ( t · c · who? ) 17:52, 7 June 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]
@Firefly: No, I haven't started the discussion. But it's an issue that I believe is necessarily raised by the forthcoming policy change. I don't want to open the discussion yet because it will just be one more confusing thing when promising-draft isn't officially settled (even though it de facto is, of course). For now, I think the bot should steer clear of promising-draft drafts and previously-kept-at-MFD drafts. Once the promising-draft discussion officially closes, the bot should expand to cover promising-draft drafts and I'll open the second discussion. Once the second discussion concludes, the bot can expand as appropriate. I'm not sure I'd say I'm "happy" for the bot to run, but I won't stand in the way of consensus... Calliopejen1 (talk) 19:12, 7 June 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]
(Note that the discussion below branched from a separate discussion above. Calliopejen1 (talk) 06:36, 8 June 2018 (UTC))Reply[reply]
(ec) @Calliopejen1: It will be tagged for deletion after six months of no edits to the page. If a draft is kept at MfD and then nobody does anything whatsoever to it (not even a dummy edit to reset the G13 timer) for half a year then it's likely that people aren't as interested in it as the MfD participants thought. ƒirefly ( t · c · who? ) 16:42, 7 June 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]
I don't think the people voting at MfD would change their minds based on six months of inactivity. (The view seems to be that the content is valuable, whether it is developed now or at some uncertain date in the future.) Calliopejen1 (talk) 16:53, 7 June 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Incorrect, often the view is, "this isn't controversial enough to require deletion right now, leave it alone to be either worked on or abandoned to G13." With all due respect, you haven't exactly been an MfD regular until fairly recently, so perhaps you're not the best judge of what the usual attitude there is. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 21:15, 7 June 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]
I was only referring to the particular discussion about the history of Thailand, which is no longer clear because of intervening edits that divided the discussion. I don't know one way or another what the usual attitude is (and didn't mean to make any general statements), but it seems to me that the possibility of discussions like the one I cited mean that human tagging (or requiring a second deletion discussion) is a better outcome. Calliopejen1 (talk) 06:32, 8 June 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Given that G13 is now applicable to all Drafts and rejected/unsubmitted AfC submissions, are there any objections to rewriting the bot to use a database query rather than the AfC categories? It would still work from the oldest articles forward, and all other functionality would remain identical. I think that doing so would increase maintainability and ensure that all eligible drafts get picked up. ƒirefly ( t · c · who? ) 21:52, 6 June 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]

G13 does not apply to ((promising draft)) tagged articles per the argument that the speedy-deletion is pre-contested. This applies to an extremely small fraction of drafts (all are listed at Category:Promising draft articles), and the situation is a mess. It is heavily contested at Wikipedia_talk:Criteria_for_speedy_deletion#Request_for_comment:_Promising_drafts, the controversy of the contest means that speedy deletion should not apply, because speedy deletion is for uncontestable cases. But worse, the mechanism is a mess. The ((promising draft)) is an ad hoc creation, created without sufficient communication with the bot owner. How is the bot supposed to recognise the template or category? What if the template is modified, or the category modified? I recommend that the bot owner take responsibility for the template, and the category. Or, subject to the direction of consensus at Wikipedia_talk:Criteria_for_speedy_deletion#Request_for_comment:_Promising_drafts, perhaps the "promising drafts" should be moved out of draftspace entirely, perhaps to my proposed WP:WikiProject Promising Drafts. I like my suggestion, because there is a beauty of simplicity that every page in draftspace, redirects excepted, are on a six month inactivity limit. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:03, 7 June 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • "Premature" is the wrong word. The fact of the statement is true right now based upon the RfC having been initiated. The RfC is underway, the application of G13 to ((promising draft)) tagged articles is currently controversial. I suggest that the bot should be restricted from tagging those articles until there is clarity. This sounds like a major headache for the bot owner, and I think this is what is the practice reason for the upset of User:Hasteur. I suggest that the bot operator, User:Firefly, take responsibility and even ownership of the troublesome tag. For the period until the close of the RfC, alternative practical solutions include: Move the promising drafts out of draftspace; or manually check the category intersection and remove tagged pages; delay re-implementation of the bot until the RfC is closed. I worry that the RfC is not on a path to a simple answer. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 06:23, 7 June 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • I could argue CSD nuance, but we seem to agree on the main point. Get this going again, while helping the operator avoid wandering into an abusive room. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 07:11, 7 June 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]
@SmokeyJoe: @Fastily: Agreed, until a clear consensus develops on ((promising draft)), pages tagged with it will be skipped. ƒirefly ( t · c · who? ) 07:26, 7 June 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]
@Firefly:, User:Primefac has close the RfC Wikipedia_talk:Criteria_for_speedy_deletion#Request_for_comment:_Promising_drafts. The bot shouldn’t have to worry about this template. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 10:07, 1 July 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • Noted - for now the bot will cover Draft: space, but I will look into those and file another BRFA to expand the functionality once this one has shown to be acceptable technically and societally. ƒirefly ( t · c · who? ) 13:20, 7 June 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]
The bot will cover Draft: namespace pages only. The bot's name comes from my old username (see here). If the community feel that this task is better run under a specific bot account (e.g. User:G13Bot), then I can create such an account. The bot wasn't set as exclusion compliant because it is extremely unlikely that a user will apply ((nobots)) to their draft to prevent the bot from tagging it, and I'm not sure that's a desirable outcome anyway. That said, the bot should and will respect exclusions for talk pages when notifying. I'll add this in. ƒirefly ( t · c · who? ) 07:26, 7 June 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Arbitrary section split for an update[edit]

I have decided following some wise counsel to split the 'notify creators of impending G13 doom' task out into another BRFA. This way the (arguably more important) notification task can begin now, even as the nominating task is postponed awaiting policy clarity. ƒirefly ( t · c · who? ) 18:17, 8 June 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]

((BAGAssistanceNeeded)) Now that the RfC around ((promising draft)) has been closed, with the outcome being that the template cannot be used to permanently immunise drafts against G13 (adding the template, like any other edit, will of course reset the six month timer), it'd be good to get this request moving again. The bot will not take ((promising draft)) into account, as per the consensus developed at the RfC. ƒirefly ( t · c · who? ) 17:45, 1 July 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Primefac, @Xaosflux: It's been well over a month since this task was last edited. Since the bot will be skipping pages with ((Promising draft)), it seems safe to move forward with a trial. -FASTILY 20:40, 19 August 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Approved for trial (50 edits). Please provide a link to the relevant contributions and/or diffs when the trial is complete. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 19:49, 20 August 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]

A user has requested the attention of the operator. Once the operator has seen this message and replied, please deactivate this tag. (user notified) Firefly Were you able to make any of the trial edits? SQLQuery me! 10:45, 8 September 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Request Expired. No response from operator. — xaosflux Talk 11:54, 21 September 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. To request review of this BRFA, please start a new section at WT:BRFA.
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