Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/InstructorCommentBot
Operator: ExpertCommentBot (talk · contribs)
Time filed: 15:00, Thursday August 4, 2011 (UTC)
Automatic or Manual: Manual
Programming language(s):PHP and Javascript
Source code available:the sourcecode will be available once it is cleaned up for sharing
Function overview: The bot posts comments to article talk pages on behalf of an identified Wikipedia user who are experts in different scientific fields and the comments are their evaluation of the article and how to improve the article.
Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate):This bot is relevant to an ongoing project to work with different scientific communities to improve the quality of Wikipedia articles by involving the experts in the field. This project has been started as an initiative in collaboration with Association for Psychological Science. More information about the initiative can be found at: http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/members/aps-wikipedia-initiative, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Psychology/APS-Wikipedia_Initiative
Edit period(s): Continuous
Estimated number of pages affected: We expect about 500 pages to be edited in about 3 months time period.
Exclusion compliant (Y/N): Y
Already has a bot flag (Y/N):
Function details: The goal of the bot is to make the process of posting comments on article talk pages easy for users who are not familiar with Wikipedia markup language. The users who have access to this bot are experts in different scientific fields such as psychology and sociology and the purpose of the comments left on the article talk pages are providing information on how the article can be improved. The bot is connected to a portal that researcher at Carnegie Mellon University have been developing as part of the bigger project on involving experts in improving the quality of Wikipedia articles. As part of this project, the team is developing tools to support faculty who are interested to use Wikipedia in classroom. An important purpose of this bot is to allow faculty to share comments they are providing to their students with the Wikipedia community to broaden the audience who can contribute in addressing the problems with the article. To avoid the abuse of the bot, the bot is not allowed to post comments more than one in 2 minutes per single user. Any attempt to abuse the bot will alert the system administrators and they will follow up on the account which has been making the attempt.
Discussion
Since the messages from this bot are individual messages from real people, we do not want to skip any message even if it is related to template pages, we would like all messages to be be delivered.
Moreover, for the same reason and the fact that these edits represents the comments of a real person we would like those post *not* to be flagged as by a bot to make sure that they are not going to be filtered out of watchlists and recent changes.