User talk:WikiLearnBot

Approval and rate

Pinging APatro. This bot is making very high speed edits without a bot flag or local approval. I'm also a bit concerned about the content model and page title/hierarchy, though that would be discussed in a bot approval request. If this continues editing, especially at this rate, without a flag/approval it will need to be blocked until it's fixed. Best, Vermont 🐿️ (talk) 05:55, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

Hi, Vermont.

I am the program officer at the Wikimedia Foundation responsible for the WikiLearn project, the online learning platform we are developing for use by the entire movement. To make the course contents on WikiLearn translatable, we rely on exporting contents for translation on Meta and then importing translations into the (off-wiki) Open edX platform that runs WikiLearn. This process is facilitated in part by this bot.

I will be making a bot request for this bot now. I understand the concern about the rate; I will see to it that the bot be modified to obey the expected rate-limit.

Could you spell out your concern about the content model and page title/hierarchy? These pages are not really meant for human consumption as they are; they are a way to store the strings to be translated as message-bundles. Since the entire hierarchy will only serve WikiLearn's localization, and since the bot doesn't touch any other page on Meta, I expect whatever is practical for this need should be okay, but by all means, let me know if after this explanation, you still have concerns. Asaf (WMF) (talk) 19:06, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

Hey Asaf, thanks for the reply!

Re: the page title/hierarchy, the main concern would be ensuring that pages are easily identifiable in the event of vandalism; say, if the vandalized content was visible on the WikiLearn platform, but very difficult to find on Meta. If these are each for individual courses, it may be beneficial to have the translatable message bundles as a subpage of a name for each course. Of course, this depends on how the message bundles are treated, and this may not be an issue as I'm not entirely familiar with the setup here.

And thanks for the note about the expected rate limit, it was a bit surprising to see that many edits in a minute. Vermont 🐿️ (talk) 19:31, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

P.S. it is not clear to me which of the three ways listed in Bot policy applies here. It seems to me none of them do: this is neither a Global bot, nor an automatic-approval one, nor one affecting any community matter or content on Meta, so I am not sure it makes sense to ask for community consensus to approve it. It seems to me a little too close to a false consultation, which I definitely want to avoid.

This feature is developed by WMF, and the WikiLearnBot account is making API calls activating code in Mediawiki's Translate extension newly-developed by the Language Engineering team to accommodate this new model of translating content.

Given that, does it still make sense to seek community consensus on this bot, or would it make more sense to ask a WMF admin to give the account the bot flag, as part of implementing this new translation flow in Mediawiki? Asaf (WMF) (talk) 19:30, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

WMF T&S is technically able to grant bot flags, as an extension of their ability to grant staff rights...you can make a bot discussion, or ask T&S to do it through usual staff userrights policies. It's relatively uncontroversial so long as it doesn't continue editing at this rate.

I'll note that the "community consensus" method listed in the bot policy simply states that the third method to gain bot approval is to ask local projects through their own processes, like Meta's bot RfAs. The policy does not discuss scope; i.e., it doesn't say that community consensus is only needed for bots that affect community matters. It says the opposite: communities have full control over the bots that act on their projects, except when it's a global bot (which they can opt out of) or if it meets automatic approval criteria (which they can also remove if they want to).

Honestly I'm not sure how staff bots have been handled previously, and there's very few instances of it. In my view, as long as it keeps within acceptable rate limits and doesn't edit outside of its defined scope, there shouldn't be any issues, and it may be easier just to ask T&S. Vermont 🐿️ (talk) 19:45, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

Oops, forgot to ping Vermont 🐿️ (talk) 19:45, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

Thank you very much, this is helpful.

I acknowledge your correction to my statement of the third method. I'll make sure the rate-limiting is implemented and that the edits are marked as bot edits, and then ask T&S to grant a bot flag. Asaf (WMF) (talk) 19:50, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

Awesome, thanks! :-) Vermont 🐿️ (talk) 19:51, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

Source code

@APatro (WMF): Can you please provide a link to the source code for this bot? Legoktm (talk) 02:59, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

Certainly! Here is the relevant code that calls the Meta API. Asaf (WMF) (talk) 08:04, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

Thanks, added a link to it on the bot's userpage. Legoktm (talk) 02:00, 5 November 2022 (UTC)

Bot flag not applied to edits / page creations

Hello @APatro (WMF) and @Asaf (WMF). Despite WikiLearnBot having an active bot flag, its edits today are being visible on Special:RecentChanges, making the RC feed unreadable due to the bot's high edit rate. Could you please take a look at the bot's code and see what may be overriding the bot flag? Thank you. Sincerely, —MarcoAurelio (talk) 17:42, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for flagging this. Jon Harald Søby has pushed a patch to fix this: https://github.com/wikimedia/edx-platform/pull/353

We'll try to have this deployed soon.

Regards, APatro (WMF) (talk) 09:54, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

The changes have been deployed and future edits should have the bot flag.

Regards, APatro (WMF) (talk) 08:21, 12 September 2023 (UTC)