User:Tangotango/Dellie

Dellie is a proposed IRC/Meta bot whose main purpose is to:

• Allow any voiced user in #wikimedia-swmt (the Small Wiki Monitoring Team reporting channel) to issue a command to easily post a deletion request on Multilingual speedy deletions for any Wikimedia wiki. The user issues a command in the following form:

!delete ''en:w:Main Page'' r=My reason here

(The reason is always required.) The bot then lists the request on Multilingual speedy deletions along with the IRC user's nickname (or cloak, as it is more recognizable and trustable, if one is set).

• Prune Multilingual speedy deletions every twenty minutes so that fulfilled requests are removed from the list automatically, preventing the list from becoming stale. (The bot checks every page on the list, via api.php to reduce bandwidth usage, to see if it has already been deleted.)

Whenever the bot edits the list, it leaves an informative edit summary listing what wikis have pages to be deleted. It is hoped that administrators of small wikis will watchlist this page so that they can delete pages on their home wiki without Steward intervention.

The bot can also be modified quite easily to allow commands from users in other, non-SWMT channels.

Testing

The bot is currently being tested live on testwiki, at http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilingual_speedy_deletion . (The interwiki links appear as interlanguage links, and pages on Meta appear as redlinks to articles, as the bot is designed to operate on Meta, not on the Wikipedia family).

Potential problems

• Because Multilingual speedy deletions is currently overcrowded with human comments, it is very difficult for an automated tool to add to this list, and to prune it of obsolete entries. Either Multilingual speedy deletions will have to be restructured to be more bot-friendly, or the bot will probably have to write to a different page (perhaps a subpage of Multilingual speedy deletions).
• Although much more active than a year back, Multilingual speedy deletions still does not get a very quick response time. It would probably be necessary to advertise the page more (among stewards and administrators of local wikis) so that the page (and the bot) actually prove to be useful.

Why there is a need for a bot

• Spammers often create identical or similar pages on several wikis at once in one single spree. Users of the SWMT channel see this in the IRC feed (since the bots report edits to over 600 Wikimedia wikis), but many are not Stewards and are unable to notify Stewards in time. The only way is to reproduce the feed on Multilingual speedy deletions, often in an unsightly manner. This also takes a lot of time that could be reduced through the use of an automated tool.
• Pruning a list of pages with links to several different wikis is a time-consuming process for any human. It is a task best done by a bot.

Original idea

The original idea started from a thread on Multilingual speedy deletion's talk page.