The use of a bot by moderators

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Bots are a two edged sword. At this moment there are two groups of people making use of bots.

  1. Legitimate users: they add tremendous value to our projects.
  2. Vandals: they are a menace, need to be burned at the stake as an introduction to this special place reserved for them in Hell.

When a vandalbot has done his worst, we are left with a mess. It means that depending on the amount of vigilance a lot of damage may have been done. So let us use the other side of the sword. Let's have a bot that can do two things:

  1. Revert changes done by a particular user.
  2. Delete all pages added by this particular user.

Have as an extra parameter a date to allow for compromised users and we have a useful tool.

Using a bot in this fashion will mean two differences: they should not run as a bot. The action of a script that does moderator work needs to be visible. It needs a moderator to run it.

So I ( GerardM ) would be able to run this bot on the nl:wiktionary and the nl:wikipedia only. When I abuse my powers using a bot, there is only one proper punishment; stripping me of my moderator status and perhaps a ban for some to be defined time.

In a way mediawiki is in an arms race with the vandalbot writers. We can use the technology that is available to us. We should also make use of the legal options that are available to us. The legal option makes sense as we are in there to win this war we are not there willing to play/fight it.

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