[OSM-talk] Bot edits on the OSM wiki

[Frederik Ramm]

Christoph,

you recognize yourself that your position is a bit extreme about this.

Personally, I have an issue with Wikipedia which, at least in some
less-frequently visited corners of the project, often looks more like a
bot playground than a collaborative project by humans. This negative
impression (page last edited by a human a year ago, and after that, 10
edits by bots) also informs my skepticism towards mechanical edits in OSM.

But: If you engage in the collaborative writing of a document with
others, and one of them decides to replace all occurrences of "Open
Source Software" with "Free and Open Source Software" (for example), by
using a search-and-replace mechanism in the chosen editing platform,
would you also object to that?

And then further, assuming your answer is "well that's ok if the edit
makes sense", what if Mediawiki had a global search-and-replace
function, where you click on a button, and fill in a form. Would this
also make you disengage from the platform altogehter?

>From there, it's only a small step to "bot edits", they're basically
nothing else than a global search-and-replace, it's just the way the
Mediawiki software is built that people use the "bot API" for things
like this.

You mention a potential "two class system" but frankly, does this not
already exist, with one class being those who understand and use
templates to the full extent of their capabilities, and the other class
not daring to touch them?

I think that "bot edits" should certainly be discussed and controlled,
and not be used to unilaterally introduce features that one person
likes, but many of the same effects of bot edits can even today be
achieved by making changes to templates - you can change the appearence
of 100s of pages with a little templating magic.

I don't really understand how you can be fundamentally opposed to one
and accept the other.

I think it would benefit the wiki if we stopped allowing everyone to
pursue their personal hobby horses - wit recent motorcycle stuff, or
wikidata features added, or a lot of verdy_p's work - and request that
more discussion happens before edits are made.

But I don't think that "bot or not bot" is the big question.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"