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 Denied.

Operator: SagaUser (talk · contribs)

Automatic or Manually assisted: Manually assisted

Programming language(s): C# (.NET Framework 3.5)

Source code available:SagaCookBot source, Archive password: SagaPublishingService

Function overview:Addition of articles and further modifications

Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate):

Edit period(s):Time to time run

Estimated number of pages affected:about 150 - 200 pages

Exclusion compliant (Y/N):No

Already has a bot flag (Y/N):No

Function details: Bot performs articles addition and editing on behalf of content managers from external cooking web site. Process in general as follows: content manager adds article on cooking we site and then may opt to publish it to wikipedia using bot. Bot publishes all content as is from cooking web site to wiki. Later on if content manager alters article text it may opt to update article on wikipedia using bot. Regarding Exclusion compliancy bot may be stopped easily by simply disabling its account. Also bot cannot harm the wikipedia as it is simply publishes content entered by a human.

Please set up a separate user account. The bot should only be used for approved tasks, so creating this BRfA, responding to queries (for example) should be done by the owner. Also, please let us know the cooking site which the content will be copied from, it will be important to see the copyright, as well as the quality of the work there. I'm also interested in the format of the work there, it will be pointless copying articles across if the page then requires clean-up and wikification. As well as this, you will need to get some community input on this, please visit our village pump, and inform potentially interested parties of this request. I'm not sure users will be in support of a bot which essentially copies and pastes web pages to Wikipedia (albeit, with some wiki-formatting, by the looks of your code) - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 13:44, 28 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Heh, www.sagacook.com? - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 13:46, 28 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

We have separate account for bot - SagaCookBot. Content addition and modification is approved tasks. Cooking site is www.sagacook.com but it is an old version. New version is not available yet. Page will not require clean-up and wikification it is done automatically by the bot. Is it mandatory to have community input ? Is it because it is a bot ? But how it differs from just a person who adds an articles about cooking to wikipedia ? Our bot is just a tool allowing user to avoid repeating same steps two times just because he wants to share it with a bigger audience on wikipedia.

You will need to set up a separate account (not an "IP account" or the bot account) for use by the operator or the bot. How will the bot figure out how to modify content if it is changed later? What happens if the bot creates a page, another user (User X) rewrites it, and then the sagacook page is changed slightly, will the bot lose the edit by User X?
I can't approve this bot task unless you get some community support I'm afraid, copying content from other sites is likely to be of interest to a lot of users, and may be rather controversial, please see the bot policy. Even though the bot is copying content approved by a user of a different site, it still has a lot of potential to mess up, in the formatting, referencing, etc, and it may be that Wikipedia don't actually need or want the pages - you need to ask. At the moment www.sagacook.com looks like an advertisement. If you're going to change the site a lot, you will need to do that prior to getting approval for this bot, so we can see what the site will actually look like at the time when the bot would be running. What will the articles be about? What will their copyright status be? - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 13:32, 29 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If the bot is doing content changes on behalf of multiple people, that would be starting to get into role account territory. While bots operated by multiple people are typically allowed, this would be different, as it would be submitting manually written content, which could also have licensing issues if the original author cannot easily be determined. Mr.Z-man 19:03, 29 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your input on that. Now I see your point. I will get back about copyrighting thing a bit later. Regarding content modification: bot does not determine modifications itself, when content manager modifies content it can run bot in order to put updated content on WikiPedia. Unfortunately we cannot guarantee that content will not be overridden if User X also modified content (I guess WikiPedia also cannot guarantee this since User Y may come and completely rewrite article created by User X, am I right ?) before content manager (but we are asking content manager before publishing changes if he really wants to overwrite whole article). Also if it is a serious issue that may prevent bot approving I guess we may disable content updates by bot, but it is really really not desirable. Regarding showing you new version of the site prior to bot approval: is it ok if we show you not the final version but the version in our test environment since it is crucial for us to get bot approved prior to site finished and publicly available? Regarding community input: Would you specify what exactly should I do (e.g. link, information, steps) in order to get community input on this ? Thanks.

This could be quite a serious issues, and would require either the bot or the content manager to always check that the page has not changed since the last update. Of course Wikipedia doesn't guarantee that a user's contributions will remain, but normally the user overwriting them will at least see what they are overwriting. I suppose seeing the test site would be okay, but I'm not sure it's worth it unless we can actually see how the articles which are going to be on the site look. You would have to make sure the articles meet Wiikpedia's requirements, as well as your own. Could you let us know what these articles are likely to be about? And how they are likely to be written (what format will they be in, will it be the same as Wikipedia?). Regarding community input, I've created a section at the village pump for you, so hopefully we'll get some from there. - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 09:05, 30 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If the content is an acceptable standard and the copyright checks out then I'm happy to have a bot load some extra articles to Wikipedia. But I'm uncomfortable with bot updating as that looks to me like making Wikipedia a mirror of another site. Bot updating of articles that were created this way and have not subsequently been edited other than by bots would be OK, as would adding a talkpage message along the lines of "this article was originally sourced from http://www.sagacook.com/Bakedbeansontoast - that article has subsequently been updated and could be used as a source to update this article". ϢereSpielChequers 10:00, 30 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I have some serious concerns about this. Firstly, we aren't a cookbook - if the intention is to copy recipes over to Wikipedia, you'd be better off copying them to Wikibooks instead, which does maintain a cookbook. Secondly, it looks like Saga Cooking is a for-profit business. While I have no problem with contributions from a for-profit business, bot edits must not violate our Neutral point of view policy for content, nor be otherwise promotional, so suggesting the use of your cooking papers (or cooking papers in general) is right out. If that would remove the entire reason for these contributions, then you should contribute this material. It would help in discussing both preceding points if you could point to a sample of what you hope to contribute along with an indication of where you wish to contribute it.

In addition, we need to be certain that your bot does not violate copyright and does not cause us to violate copyright or our own license. One way to do this would be to explicitly place the contributed material in the public domain, if you have the right to do that; then we can't possibly screw it up on our side. Another way would be to explicitly license the material under the license of Wikipedia (CC-BY-SA-3.0 (unported) plus GFDL 1.3) and supply a list of contributors or a link to a version elsewhere that is legitimately under that license. Lastly, we would need for your bot not to edit war with human editors or to spam its material into articles where there's a consensus that it's not wanted. At a minimum, it would need to be exclusion compliant; you've indicated above that it would not be, which is unacceptable. Yes, complying with these points can be a pain, when you just want to give us free stuff - I know it. But this is what needs to be done, if you want to make such contributions. — Gavia immer (talk) 22:38, 30 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I disagree with "it will be pointless copying articles across if the page then requires clean-up and wikification" since we are only talking 200ish pages - all imported material and new articles need some clean-up. I also disagree with " have not subsequently been edited other than by bots would be OK" - because bots do things that fix/prevent breakage, and sometimes these are one-off runs - for example you could be re-adding content using dead categories and templates. I do share the other concerns, the licensing, content and WP would need to be a fork not a mirror - that's not to say that I am against data being mirrored from elsewhere, if that is the case, and it is useful, we can devise a suitable wrapper. Rich Farmbrough, 10:06, 2 May 2010 (UTC).[reply]

My point about it being pointless if the page requires cleanup is that it would be just as easy for a user to copy the article manually and clean it up, as to have the bot copy it and then a user clean it up. - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 10:22, 2 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I see. True up to a point. Rich Farmbrough, 03:39, 4 May 2010 (UTC).[reply]

Sorry for the late response. Regarding automatic updates I agree that this can cause a problems so we will disable automatic updates by our bot. Only first time publishing will be available. The concept of articles is that these articles will concentrate on supporting the benefit and product claims we give about (cooking with) SAGA. This will be as scientific data as possible; studies and research that we have ordered from a third party (independent and unbiased of course, but the research focuses on the aspects that are of particular interest to us) or studies that are of interest to us but which have been initiated and conducted without any influence by our side. When this kind of data is published on sagacook.com, it’s never published as such but as a summary or as quotations. We will, naturally, always give the source when we use external material. I’m not sure what the case with copyrights is when we have ordered and paid for some 3rd party research, but definitively, when we have simply quoted a completely independent study, we don’t own it. But that’s the case with any article that uses external references. (I think the academic rule is that any published data can be used if the source is mentioned.). Does such kind of content meets Wikipedia ? About clean up - the bot will perform all cleanup automatically. I agree that maybe bot will not be able to perform all possible cleanups but at least a most common set of cleanup. Also after user publishes content it always reviews what has been published, and if there are some issues that needs to be fixed user can do this (but amount of this issues would be definitely lower than if user just copies content by hands). Do you see what I mean ? Looking forward for response from you.

Seriously: set up a user account. This BRFA can't proceed without a responsible user operating the bot. Josh Parris 03:54, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

User account created. Name - SagaUser.

Now, the only problem I can foresee that hasn't been addressed is the actual content of the articles. Would you be so kind as to manually create one of the articles you're proposing to do with the bot? Josh Parris 06:49, 21 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Is this not a conflict of interest, it seems he is editing article about his own site CrimsonBlue (talk) 16:06, 22 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It appears to be, but without seeing a proposed article it's hard to judge. Josh Parris 06:18, 23 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

No, not editing article about his own site, importing suitably licensed content. As Josh says if it is also suitable content then it is fine, since there is no ownership of the articles. Rich Farmbrough, 20:17, 26 May 2010 (UTC).[reply]

Does it make any difference in which language example article will be ?

This request for approval only effects the English Wikipedia, even if this is approved, it may only edit the English Wikipedia, therefore all of the bots articles should be written in English - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 11:11, 31 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

OK, we will prepare example article in English. But our content will be available on 6 to 9 languages. Does it mean that I need to put 6 to 9 requests on all required language versions of WikiPedia to approve the same version of the bot ? It seems really strange don't you think so ?

I'm afraid it does, since approval here does not effect other sites. It is possible to get a global bot flag, but most wikis (this one included) don't allow even global bots to edit without local approval (although we do allow global-interwiki linking bots). Each wiki has it's own policies regarding bots, so each has bots approved separately. You may want to read through the English Wikipedia bot policy, if you haven't already done so,as this explains all of that. On another note, I also wanted to voice my concerns that the pages created by this bot may be "spammy", as the sagacook site at the moment seems very promotional. So I would be interested in seeing a sample page - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 09:26, 1 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I will give you an example of article later. Also the site will be different from what you see at the moment so please don't pay to much attention to it. I'm steel very worried about need to approve bot on all languages. It seems not logical, also it will require to find persons who knows e.g. German, Spanish, Finnish, Polish etc. language in order to just register the same bot. (the one thing that make me happy is that we don't need to support Chinese language :))

This is the English Wikipedia; we have no control over any of the other WMF wikis – they have their own bot policies and approved bots. If you file for approval here, it only affects here. I'd personally like to see a bot running on this wiki before you start filing for approval on other languages, so we can see how the bot will run in the first place and other wikis have a better idea of what it will do. This request has been open for over a month and almost no progress has been made. I would really like to see how these articles are going to look, what they will be about, and how you are going to incorporate them into the rest of Wikipedia. — The Earwig ^(talk) 20:01, 1 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Frankly if you can't find a person who can take French approval process through, for example, I'm not sure why you think they would let you bot content onto their wiki. Oh well we will see what happens... Rich Farmbrough, 00:47, 4 June 2010 (UTC).[reply]

The owner has made no edits since this request as it's been 18 days since a comment on it. The owner shows lack of comprehension of Wikipedia policies, and until those can be followed I suggest that the BAG deny the request. FinalRapture - † ☪ 17:45, 21 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Please provide us with an example article, or I will expire this approval request without further notice per the above comment by FinalRapture. — The Earwig ^(talk) 19:55, 21 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry for not responding for a long time. I will provide you with an example article by the end of the week.

We have finished the example article. Could you give me your email so I send it to you ?

You can log into the SagaUser account, then use Special:EmailUser to send it to us, but wouldn't it be easier to post the whole thing online somewhere? Perhaps on the talk page of this BRFA, for example. — The Earwig ^(talk) 18:38, 2 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I am not familiar with procedures here, but if no one can clearly spell out how this might help the encyclopedia, wouldn't it be kinder to close this discussion? Is there a sample of what might be produced? Does anyone think that it would be desirable to have a bot publish a page from an external cooking site to Wikipedia? Also, the option "if content manager alters article text it may opt to update article on wikipedia using bot" seems implausible given that an article might be edited here; how would conflicts be resolved? The bot name and the operator name do not inspire confidence since the names might indicate a close connection with a commercial website. Johnuniq (talk) 10:43, 6 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Denied. Per Johnuniq and others, this does not seem like it can possibly work as a bot. I have yet to see some evidence that the articles are acceptable, and it's been months. — The Earwig ^(talk) 16:33, 6 July 2010 (UTC)[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.