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.

qbugbot

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

Time filed: 22:08, Friday, February 2, 2018 (UTC)

Automatic, Supervised, or Manual: Automatic. Edits will be programmatically scanned, and manually spot-checked soon after being made.

Programming language(s): VB

Source code available: User:Qbugbot/source

Function overview: Qbugbot creates and uploads stub articles for insects, spiders, and other arthropods.

Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate):

About 1,100 new articles have been generated and manually posted for testing and discussion.

Edit period(s): Most nights, for a few hours per night.

Estimated number of pages affected: 17,000

Namespace(s): Mainspace/Articles

Exclusion compliant (Yes/No): Yes. The bot skips all existing articles. It only creates new pages.

Function details:

Function: Create and post articles for selected arthropod species. I'll call these "bugs".

Species selection: The ITIS has most long-established arthropod species in its database, although it does not have many of the newer species and may not reflect recent reorganization of genera and higher taxa. The species in Bugguide generally reflect the latest research, and are limited primarily to species photographed or collected in North America by its users. By selecting the species that appear both in ITIS and Bugguide, we end up with a set of non-controversial species (from a taxonomic standpoint) that are not overly rare or obscure.

35,000 arthropod species are in bugguide.
23,000 of these are in ITIS (out of 250,000 total arthropod species in ITIS).
17,000 of these have no Wikipedia article.

Article upload: Articles are created on demand for upload. An article will be uploaded only if no article exists for that title. If one does exist, the article will be skipped. No existing articles will be altered. If the taxonomic parent of an uploaded article does not exist, it will be generated and uploaded. If a list of more than 100 "children" is included in the article, it will be split off as a separate list article. A talk page with the proper stub template is created for each article.

Initially, any kind of error will stop the process. As specific errors are encountered and proper handling added to the bot, those may be handled and processing continued. For example, in the beginning a communications time-out error will stop processing. It could be manually retried a few minutes later. If this works with no side effects, a time-out error could be handled by the bot by pausing for 10 minutes before a retrying the upload.

It is expected to upload 2 to 4 articles per minute, although the speed can be easily adjusted.

Manual verification: During the test period, every article created will be viewed on Wikipedia to verify that it exists, it is the correct article, and the information is proper. Later on, the text of all the day's articles will be downloaded and verified manually or automatically. At least one article daily will be manually viewed on Wikipedia.

Article creation: Articles are created in the following steps:

A taxobox template is created using the (taxonomic) ancestry of the "bug", selecting appropriate ranks for the taxobox. For example, subfamily should be included except in Lepidoptera with no subfamily common name. An image is included if available. Synonyms are added if they appear in the ITIS database. (Other catalogs may have ridiculous numbers of synomyms.)
A text introduction is generated, such as "Andrena perarmata, the well-armed andrena, is a species of mining bee in the family Andrenidae," giving the scientific name, common names (if any), taxonomic rank, an ancestor's common name, and the scientific name of the family or order.
This is followed, as available, by the distribution range, the IUCN conservation status, Hodges number, ITIS taxonomic notes, additional images, and a list of taxonomic children (if any). If there are too many children, a link to a separate list page (created afterward) is included. The distribution data comes from ITIS, World Spider Catalog, or Odonata Central.
References may include inline citations, general references, further reading, and external links.
A Wikimedia Commons template is added if there are photos, a Taxonbar is added if Wikidata has this bug listed, the appropriate Wikipedia category is selected, and the proper stub template is selected for the talk page.

Sample articles: Here is a list of the test articles generated and manually posted on February 1.

Discussion

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Note: This bot has edited its own BRFA page. Bot policy states that the bot account is only for edits on approved tasks or trials approved by BAG; the operator must log into their normal account to make any non-bot edits. AnomieBOT ⚡ 22:18, 2 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Needs wider discussion.. Please review WP:MASSCREATION. For something of this scale, there needs to be a consensus at WP:VPR before this proceeds. — JJMC89 (T·C) 22:53, 2 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Comment: So far, the proposing editor has done a good job of posting at project talk pages and incorporating feedback. I expect that additional useful feedback will come from a discussion at VPR. As a bot test, I would suggest starting slowly, with 50 or so new articles, and posting lists of those articles on the relevant project pages as well as here. Wait for a bit to ask for feedback before proceeding, and show that reasonable feedback has been incorporated in the next run of 50 articles. Once the projects are reasonably satisfied, the bot could accelerate work. – Jonesey95 (talk) 01:00, 3 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Denied. Sorry, but this bot is too controversial to even trial. Please start a discussion first.—CYBERPOWER (Around) 01:32, 3 February 2018 (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.