User talk:ClueBot Commons

The current status of ClueBot NG is: Running
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Bot needs training

If the bot sends a message to a user who changed things to follow the manual of style, something needs to change, or amusement will increase, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 18:32, 20 May 2013 (UTC)

A kitten for you!

hey hey hey, you like pancakes? i do, thxx for everything

Aambeienbeffer (talk) 09:34, 21 May 2013 (UTC)

Why isn't ClueBot III archiving my talk page?

Could someone check it, please? And is it possible to display my previous, manually archived threads inside that ClueBot archivebox? Thanks, smtchahal^talk 06:22, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

I've just given the bot a poke back into life - it should be archiving again now. Not sure about the manual archives - are they stored in the same page structure? - Damian Zaremba ^{(talk • contribs)} 21:29, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

Thanks a lot. Yes, the manual archives are also stored in the same structure (User talk:Smtchahal/Archives/) and the archivebox is displaying them already. But I have another question: does one need to keep poking the bot to keep it working? smtchahal^talk 02:14, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

Feedback please

Please offer some feedback at User talk:Eric Corbett to explain (to him and his talk page stalkers like me) what logic the bot was using in mistakenly accusing him of vandalism, once and twice - and to reassure us that this isn't the bot being WP:BITEy to a technically "new" editor, in a way which would make a genuinely new and useful editor likely to throw in the towel. It's worrying. (Oh, and second time round the bot failed to create a section heading.) PamD 18:56, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

I'd like an explanation of this rather aggressive message as well:

This is your last warning. If you vandalize Wikipedia again, as you did at Hengistbury Head, you may be blocked from editing without further notice.

I can't help but wonder how many other new editors are being similarly wrongly accused of vandalism. Eric Corbett 19:59, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

Did you report it, per the instructions? It seems pretty innocuous to me - you were changing number ranges, which is something vandals often do - so it's just a false positive. Just delete the warnings and continue on your way, and report it via the mechanism provided in the warning.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 20:29, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

I didn't, but others did. Still no response though. And it wasn't just one occurrence. And please don't try to patronise me. I'm quite able to shrug this incompetence off, but I'm concerned for those real newbies who may not find it so easy. Eric Corbett 20:51, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

The "last warning" language is part of the bog-standard warning template system; you can see the templates that Cluebot's warnings are based off of here (the rainbow-colored section links to each of the warnings in the series). It's not a Cluebot thing, though I think Cluebot uses slightly customized versions of the warning templates. The template talk is probably the place to take concerns over the way the templates are worded. A fluffernutter is a sandwich! (talk) 21:03, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

Is it? I thought there was an escalating scale of warnings? Eric Corbett 21:07, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

Fluffernutter, is it really bog standard to give a level 4 warning after two (erroneously) supposed vandalisms? I've never even seen ClueBot give anything other than an excruciatingly polite level 1 before. I can't believe it's not malfunctioning, to be behaving so uncharacteristically. Bishonen | talk 21:13, 22 May 2013 (UTC).

(edit conflict) There is an escalating scale; Cluebot cues off of the last warning given, I think, to determine what level warning to use. In this case, the last warning Eric had been given was (ironically) a level-3 warning Drmies left as a joke here. The bot knew it had warned you before, and it knew someone else had left a level three warning for you since then, so it used a level 4 warning. A fluffernutter is a sandwich! (talk) 21:15, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

Nice. That actually makes sense. Ok, so lesson here: no joke warnings! It sounds like cluebot was behaving as it should - if another editor gives a more stern warning, it should escalate further, that makes sense to me. We just need to program cluebot to understand jokes. :) --Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 21:16, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

The bot also uses the severity of the existing warnings into account (along with the other couple hundred of inputs to the ANN) when determining a score. The bot may have seen the level 3 warning and was more strict. This is why it says to remove the warning from the talk page if they are invalid. It may also take into account the good standing of the user who issued the warning, though I am not sure if that was ever done. It is not heuristic based, so I cannot definitively explain why, I can only speculate based on what I know about the inputs to the bot. -- Cobi^(t|c|b) 22:05, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

Always fun to be talked down to by clever techies who don't even bother to go look. What instructions and what mechanism provided in the warning is that, User:Obiwankenobi? [Stares at the "last warning" to Eric Corbett. No mechanism there.] How are people, let alone new editors, supposed to know where to protest? Trying to find the right page is a morass. Bishonen | talk 21:06, 22 May 2013 (UTC).

I found that to be rather strange as well, but it was my last warning after all. Eric Corbett 21:08, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

The first warning includes the following: "ClueBot NG makes very few mistakes, but it does happen. If you believe the change you made was constructive, please read about it, report it here, remove this message from your talk page, and then make the edit again.". I really wasn't trying to talk down to anyone nor be patronizing - I just think its a bit misplaced to beat up on a bot for a false positive, when the bot in its first message to you tells you that it makes mistakes and here's how to report them. Again, sorry Eric if I sounded patronizing, that wasn't my intent.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 21:10, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

Nevertheless, do you feel that a complete newbie who gets the "last warning" template is likely to feel welcomed to Wikipedia when the bot makes a second false positive in a week? We do have a problem with vandalism, but not so severe that we have to have a bitey bot exacerbate the problem of chasing off new editors. On this evidence, the algorithm needs be far less aggressive. Is there any intention to address that? --RexxS (talk) 21:18, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

Quoting Fluffernutter: "There is an escalating scale; Cluebot cues off of the last warning given, I think, to determine what level warning to use. In this case, the last warning Eric had been given was (ironically) a level-3 warning Drmies left as a joke here. The bot knew it had warned you before, and it knew someone else had left a level three warning for you since then, so it used a level 4 warning". This should answer your question. --Sitic (talk) 21:24, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

The bot takes into account recent warnings, so it issued a level 1 to start with (no previous) on the second revert, it would have issued a level 2, but determined you'd been issued a level 3 in the mean time so went straight to a level 4 warning. The behaviour is there, so the correct escalation path is followed if a human reverts an edit. I'm checking into why it didn't put a header above the warning - the only part of the warning that's actually a bug. In regards to the false positives, as I noted on your talk page; report them as such and move on, or provide constructive feedback. - Damian Zaremba ^{(talk • contribs)} 21:33, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

Trust me, you wouldn't enjoy my feedback. The bot's level 1 warning was a mistake, which it compounded two days later. The question is, why the initial level 1 warning? Eric Corbett 21:39, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

I'm not a developer on this or anything, but I've frequently seen vandals go in and just change dates or page numbers - which is what you did - for example, making everything that happened in 1125 to 125 - they think they're being clever by just removing one digit, but they're clearly just trying to insert false into into the database. If you train cluebot with lots of vandalisms like this, your edit starts to look similar. Just a guess... --Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 21:46, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

That's not what I did at all. What I did was to respond to a comment at the Middle Age's FAC about the MoS recommended way of dealing with year ranges in 4-digit centuries, by changing, for instance, "1125–1127" to "1125–27". Anyone who believes that to be vandalism is a fucking clot. Eric Corbett 22:00, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

It looks similar, in the eyes of a bot - to vandalizing dates. Again, this is just a wild guess on my part. To fix it, you'd probably have to train the bot on "good" edits of that type so it could somehow distinguish those changes from changes of a similar ilk which are due to vandalism.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 22:05, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

Also, because the toolserver DB doesn't know about this user, the bot thinks that this is a brand new user changing numbers, with previous warnings, and I have no idea what it would think about the nulls. -- Cobi^(t|c|b) 22:10, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

I'm not sure what's going on here, but if I go to my contributions page, scroll down to the bottom and click on edit count the toolserver database clearly does know about me, as it puts up a nice pie chart showing an analysis of my contributions. None of which are vandalism. Eric Corbett 23:02, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

I'll have to take a look into it more thoroughly when I get home from work. -- Cobi^(t|c|b) 23:17, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

From my experience at recent changes, Cluebot gets it right very often, and changes in number ranges are indeed common vandal edits--usually, they're edits without a summary from IP addresses to things like weight in infoboxes, or scores and stats in athletes' articles. But usually they show up in RC with an edit summary like "new editor changing numbers" or something like that. Why it would do that with Eric's edits, twice, is not clear to me. I guess that leaving a templated vandalism warning as a joke is like saying "what do you think this insulin pump is, a bomb?" in an airport, since all that security/ClueBot hears is "bomb". Drmies (talk) 00:43, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ Can we keep the discussion in one place? -- Cobi^(t|c|b) 01:38, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard#Bad Bot
This page is a soft redirect.

Warning

Per the section above by PamD, if ClueBot NG continues making false accusations of vandalism against, new, established, or good faith editors - I will block it. Hopefully User:Cobi and/or User:Crispy1989 will notice this ping and make whatever fixes are needed here. Thank you. — Ched :  ?  19:49, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

Hi Cobi

Since you're here, would you mind taking a gander at this: User_talk:ClueBot_Commons/Archives/2013/May#category_talk_pages - not urgent, just curious if I've configured it wrong, the archive doesn't show up in the box. Thx. --Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 22:30, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

|nogenerateindex=1 -- It's told not to. -- Cobi^(t|c|b) 04:00, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

Ack. I have no idea how that happened. d'oh sorry. --Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 04:17, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Barnstar of Diligence
	Hi Cluebot! This is just to let you know how much we appreciate all your hard work, even if you do sometimes make mistakes. We humans are fallible too, by the way, just in different ways from you. (Also we don't depend on toolserver quite as much.) --Demiurge1000 (talk) 22:33, 22 May 2013 (UTC)