User talk:Rob Hooft

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Hello there, welcome to the 'pedia! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. If you need pointers on how we title pages visit Wikipedia:Naming conventions or how to format them visit our manual of style. If you have any other questions about the project then check out Wikipedia:Help or add a question to the Village pump. Cheers! --maveric149

Definitely like the place. I'm completely hooked! Rob Hooft

Hello :) I've observed that common practice is to put inter-wiki links at the top of the page. Could you do so in future? Thanks, and good work on the interlinking :) Dysprosia 07:23, 27 Sep 2003 (UTC)

I'll be happy to do the interlinking at the top for all pages, as I do with all other languages. But it is on the English wikipedia that I read the discussion about frightening newcomers by putting all kinds of strange incomprehensible characters at the top of each page. If the consensus is that interwiki links should be at the top, I´ll change my habits here as well..... Rob Hooft 10:39, 27 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Wow, haven't heard that. But it's pretty much a better idea to put at the top, in my opinion, it keeps all the other interwiki links together... Up to you :) Dysprosia 13:22, 27 Sep 2003 (UTC)

All the other language wikipedias do it at the top, but there is some truth in the idea of putting them at the bottom. The en: wikipedia is not consistent: most of them are at the top, but I understand there are some people that move all of those they encounter to the bottom.... There is more truth in consistency, but if it is already lost, I don't know what to do. In any case, if there would be consistency, I could do all of the list below using my robot.... Rob Hooft 13:28, 27 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Well, if you're worried about the newcomer things, junk is reverted almost immediately, so it's no biggie bout that. It's best to be consistent, and if there's inconsistencies, I wouldn't mind fixing them -- if I knew where they were :) Dysprosia 13:30, 27 Sep 2003 (UTC)

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OK, that's me done - I've left you anything that seemed even slightly complicated ;) If you have another similar list in the future and you want a hand, feel free to give me a shout - I like these sort of fiddles :) Regards -- sannse 13:30, 5 Oct 2003 (UTC)

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Hi. I just had a quick chat with User:Andre Engels about the bot he was using. He said it was your creation and I should ask you if I wanted a copy, as you only hand it out to people who are trustworthy. Which is only fair. Anyways, you can tell what I'm getting at ;-): Could you send me a copy of the code? Trustworthyness: Firstly, I'm an admin. Secondly, I've installed wikipedia, apache, etc. on my own computer to test the robot before I use it. This is mainly so that if I make any changes to it, I can test first. Thanks. --snoyes 19:31, 7 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Oops, almost forgot. You can send it to sascha(at)pantropy(dot)net. --snoyes 19:33, 7 Oct 2003 (UTC)

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Hello. I am also very interested to see your bot mainly for the reason that I am sort of leading this project called Consumerium, see here for a brief explanation of our current strategy. Our R&D Wiki is at http://www.consumerium.org/wiki/ and it is running MediaWiki. We are not in desparate need of a bot for the R&D wiki, but we are planning to use a Wiki for Content when we get to the stage that we can set one (and gradually more) up. Originally we planned to store all content in XML, in which case all sorts of internationalization / translation questions would have been "under control", but due to our new design paradigm we are facing the tedious task of managing multiple wikis so that is the reason why I'm asking to get your bot.

We have succesfully developed a theory of how it would function and have laid out a framework which might enable us to make the theory work in practice and the current stage is arranging a million details so that the finished system is flexible yet rigid, sophisticated enough to be resilient to vandalism, disinformation and other mischief yet simple to understand. I would like to invite you to join our effort Juxo 09:51, 8 Oct 2003 (UTC) ps. my email is juxo (aat) consumerium (d00t) org

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To all people that have or want a copy of the robot: I am willing to hand it to people, but the problem is that this is growing a bit out of my hands. All of these people could contribute to the code, and I'd like to make it completely open-source. We could then open e.g. a sourceforge project for the robot, and work on this collaboratively, making it better than I would ever be able to make it. OTOH, I'd like to discuss this before it happens with the Wikipedia programmers to make sure that they agree with the open availability of robot code. In principle it is not difficult to make a robot, especially if it is only meant to do harm/vandalize. Writing a good robot, however, is fairly difficult, and as I have noticed: there are lots of good ideas for applications of robots in the Wikipedia community.

Please give me some time to think about this and discuss it. Especially since the server is currently so heavily overloaded that robot accesses are not desired, I hope that you can wait a bit longer. 213.84.188.48 11:40, 16 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Thanks for the response. I totally understand your concerns with handing out the code. I also agree that it would be best if the source could be out in the open, having a free software project. Could these problems perhaps be alleviated by only allowing logged-on users (or further restricted: admin users) to operate the robot on wikipedia. Note that I don't know whether this is technically feasible, and is something that would have to be implemented on the wikipedia server side. The problem of the load is also a big one. I would say that when the dual opteron DB server goes live the situation will be much better. But still, if one can implement a restriction of robot use to logged-in (or admin) users, then one can simply decree a maximum number of edits/minute that people are allowed to make. If these rules are violated then warning/disciplinary (with repeated abuse) measures may be invoked. --snoyes 16:33, 16 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Restricting the robot from using the wikipedia server in any way is impossible because it is technically impossible to differentiate between a robot and a normal browser except if the robot volunteers to tell the system it is a robot.... Rob Hooft 20:13, 16 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Contents 1 Interln bot needs fixing 2 HeraldicBot 3 pywikipediabot development 4 HasharBot 5 Swedish wikipedia 6 Article Licensing

[edit] Interln bot needs fixing

I got this message from a chinese user. --Alexandros(aplank)

Bot operator Alex, Wikipedia:Chinese interlanguage links should be read before you add anymore Chinese interlinks. --Menchi 03:20, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Alexandros 03:28, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

• Would you have a look at User talk:Alexandros and Wikipedia:Interlanguage links before changing further articles? --User:Docu

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[edit] HeraldicBot

I'm planning to use Robbot for uploading heraldic images. I'm talking to the en: sysops about this, but I thought I should let you know too. Marnanel 01:06, 6 Mar 2004 (UTC)

OK, that is what free software is for. You should, if you are not already, become a member of the pywikipediabot-users mailing list! Rob Hooft 21:02, 8 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Thank you! I've now joined. BTW, the "special" namespace in cy: is called Arbennig, if you fancy putting that into wikipedia.py too. Marnanel 21:33, 8 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Done Rob Hooft 21:37, 8 Mar 2004 (UTC)

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Hi. I tried to get the python program to work. It's a great tool, I should have tried it earlier to solve disambiguations. BTW in the category part, possibly it's the configuration I chose or the last two ns.append that duplicate existing categories, deleting them seems to solve it. -- User:Docu

These two lines are unnecessary on en:, but I didn't realize that they could do harm. It could be that this part of the code has not been tested very well on en:; if you report this problem on the robot mailinglist or as a bug on the tracker, more people might look at it... Could you indicate how the problem manifests itself? Rob Hooft 04:29, 19 Jun 2004 (UTC)

e.g. [1] -- User:Docu

[edit] pywikipediabot development

• Hello, I am Milos and I am working on Serbian Wikipedia. I have some ideas about using bot for Serbian Wikipedia: At least, we would need transliteration from Cyrillic to Latin alphabet and vice versa. I know Python syntax, so I can be useful ;) Also, as my "official" education is linguistic, I like to play with words. I downloaded source, but I don't see documentation... Tell me where to start? --Millosh 04:50, 27 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Sorry, I'm not logging in frequently here. Please become a member of the mailing list for the pywikipediabot. The documentation is basically part of the source code, but if you want to know more, you're welcome to ask on the mailing list. Rob Hooft 14:30, 12 Sep 2004 (UTC)

[edit] HasharBot

Hello, Rob! Thank you for running interwiki fixing HasharBot on Slovene Wikipedia, and especially thanks also for converting old ones to Unicode. There's just one more thing: could you, please, create an account for your robot and mark interwiki changes as minor, so that we can ignore them in "Trenutne spremembe"? --romanm (talk) 15:33, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Swedish wikipedia

Hallo, Rob, I had a look on the Boots discussion page on the swedish wiki today. Its long and takes LONG time to load. Is there anything which can be done? What is the purpose? Should the links which is linking wrong be manually corrected? Will this page get shorter futurevise? How can I help? I joined the maillist. (Answer on my swedish userpage will faster be found) :) Dan Koehl 12:14, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Article Licensing

Hi, I've started a drive to get users to multi-license all of their contributions that they've made to either (1) all U.S. state, county, and city articles or (2) all articles, using the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC-by-sa) v1.0 and v2.0 Licenses or into the public domain if they prefer. The CC-by-sa license is a true free documentation license that is similar to Wikipedia's license, the GFDL, but it allows other projects, such as WikiTravel, to use our articles. Since you are among the top 2000 Wikipedians by edits, I was wondering if you would be willing to multi-license all of your contributions or at minimum those on the geographic articles. Over 90% of people asked have agreed. For More Information:

• Multi-Licensing FAQ - Lots of questions answered
• Multi-Licensing Guide
• Free the Rambot Articles Project

To allow us to track those users who muli-license their contributions, many users copy and paste the "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" template into their user page, but there are other options at Template messages/User namespace. The following examples could also copied and pasted into your user page:

Option 1

I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below:

{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}

OR

Option 2

I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions to any [[U.S. state]], county, or city article as described below:

{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}

Or if you wanted to place your work into the public domain, you could replace "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" with "{{MultiLicensePD}}". If you only prefer using the GFDL, I would like to know that too. Please let me know what you think at my talk page. It's important to know either way so no one keeps asking. -- Ram-Man (comment| talk)