User talk:Madman

Regarding the article knowledge based community sharing system

Dear madman!! I already sent the original document to wiki which u mentioned to do last month. Please revoke the page as soon as possible. Give me a tip otherwise what shall be done to revoke my article in wikipedia again in quick time. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 49.238.50.42 (talk • contribs) 20:30, 21 February 2012‎ (UTC)

If you submitted a declaration of consent to permissions-en at wikimedia.org and still haven't heard back, you may want to send it again. Unfortunately, I cannot restore the article until an OTRS volunteer has verified permission. Thanks, — madman 23:32, 21 February 2012 (UTC)

I have searched the permissions queues and do not see your e-mail; you may want to resend. :( If you can e-mail me with the From: address you used or other details about the e-mail, I may be able to track it down more easily. Thanks, — madman 21:51, 25 February 2012 (UTC)

Ticket:2012012810010555 is for you. -- DQ (ʞlɐʇ) 09:04, 29 February 2012 (UTC)

Hello this is User:Phoenix B 1of3

Moved to User talk:Phoenix B 1of3

A barnstar for you

		The Anti-Flame Barnstar
		I thank you immensely for your helpfulness and your patience with me, I know I can be hard to deal with at times, I thank you for your advise, and I wish to award you this Barnstar. :) – Phoenix B 1of3 (talk) 17:25, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

Thanks! Happy editing! :) — madman 17:47, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

Bot Stats

Hello madman...I just wanted to check in and see if you've had a chance to collect that data that we discussed on bots. No rush really...just wondering. Thanks again for the help (and really, no dire rush on this...I'm sure you're busy). UOJComm (talk) 20:04, 25 February 2012 (UTC)

Not yet; I'll be able to as soon as I get out of the approval process with some of my new bot tasks. :) Thanks, — madman 21:08, 25 February 2012 (UTC)

Cool...thank you very much for your help! UOJComm (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 22:38, 27 February 2012 (UTC).

As of this morning, I have the raw data; I'll play with it in the morning to add some pivot table summaries and pretty charts, then I'll post it online. Cheers! — madman 00:43, 28 February 2012 (UTC)

Awesome...thank you! UOJComm (talk) 18:57, 29 February 2012 (UTC)

• Preliminary data for bot edits have been posted with a summary here. Final data are being generated now. — madman 17:12, 1 March 2012 (UTC)
• Regarding data for BRFAs, I used the date a request page was added to a category as the date approved/denied/expired/revoked/withdrawn, which doesn't require parsing the request pages, but it seems this is only accurate after 2/28, as that seems to be when the categories were created and existing request pages mass-added. I don't know if that will be useful to you (there are about 769 bot tasks approved, 130 denied, 92 expired, 14 revoked, 142 withdrawn after that point). Let me know; I can parse the request pages, but it'll take longer. — madman 17:20, 1 March 2012 (UTC)
• Final data for bot registrations have been posted in the same location with a summary here. — madman 17:49, 1 March 2012 (UTC)

  Highlights: Yes, bots now make anywhere from 5.5 million to 7.0 million edits per month across Wikimedia projects. No, I do not know why 750 bot accounts were registered in October 2006. Also note that all these data are for bots flagged within a project; I don't believe it accounts for globally flagged bots (though it may). — madman 17:53, 1 March 2012 (UTC)

Thank you so much for these stats Madman. A few questions:

• So the Bot Edits data does not include English WP? (enwiki_p)? I'm guessing there will be a sizable number of bot edits there that might move these overall numbers a bit? I know you said those numbers would be coming, so I just wanted to see if you think I should wait before digging in to these stats.
• I'm not quite sure what you mean by "I used the date a request page was added to a category" and "but it seems this is only accurate after 2/28, as that seems to be when the categories were created and existing request pages mass-added". Could you please explain that just a bit more for me?
• Am I correct in assuming that the Bot Edit data includes all actions by bots (changes in any namespace, additions as well as reverts, etc.)? UOJComm (talk) 19:20, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

• No, the bot edits data does not currently include English WP, but it will. That query has been running for eight hours now, I think, and it probably has a bit to go. I assume as you do that it will change the aggregate data significantly. The bot edits data includes all bot edits, which includes reverts. I can't think of any bot that significantly uses non-edit actions (delete, move, protect, etc.).
• Update: I killed the query and reworked it to run about a hundred times faster. The final data's ready but I actually can't pull it right now to compile a report as the server's dead/suffering from heavy load. Sigh... But judging by the sheer size of the English WP data, I think it might be a significant outlier, so I might do a report with and without it. — madman 07:35, 3 March 2012 (UTC)
• When a request for approval is approved, it is added to Category:Wikipedia approved bot requests. MediaWiki stores a timestamp of when it was added to the category, so that's a really easy way to query exactly when the request was approved without having to parse anything. But those categories didn't exist until 2/28/2009, at which point they were created and all pre-existing requests were added to them. You can see the problem there, I think: It looks like hundreds of requests were approved in a couple days. Let me know if this makes sense and which approach you want me to take. — madman 20:31, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the update and all the work. So 1) the data you have on Bot Registration is strictly for when the account name was registered (is that correct?), and 2) the BRFA data will only really be accurate after 2/28/09...in which case, it will give a picture of BRFA approvals/denies etc. since then, but not before. That is at least some data, though if there is another way to parse the request pages to get accurate data all the way back, that would of course be more telling for me. I really don't know how much of a pain a parse like that is, so I will defer to you...if it is a big job that wouldn't produce anything particularly interesting for you and you'd like to skip it, I totally understand. UOJComm (talk) 19:47, 3 March 2012 (UTC)

1.) That is correct. 2.) I'll see how difficult it'll be to parse. Probably not too difficult for a script, it's just a matter of time to write the script. 3.) Final data are posted for bot edits; I don't think enwiki was more significant an outlier than some of the others (commonswiki, dewiki). — madman 05:00, 4 March 2012 (UTC)

Bot query

Could you look at my comment at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Valyoo technologies? Your bot tagged a copyvio, but by the time I looked into it, only the first sentence was in existence at the source. I'm wondering if the bot didn't read further, or if they blanked out their 'about us' page to make it appear non copyvio here. (Has happened before...) Peridon (talk) 18:51, 26 February 2012 (UTC)

Note: Answered question there. — madman 19:40, 28 February 2012 (UTC)

Baseball Reference Bullpen

I just copied text from http://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Pablo_Ortega to create Pablo Ortega on this wiki, and your bot caught it and flagged it as a copyvio. I'd like to point out that the Baseball Reference Bullpen is a wiki, and all text is in the public domain. I added the {{Bullpen}} template at the bottom of the Wikipedia page that acknowledges this. Perhaps you can update your bot to clarify that this isn't a copyvio. Thanks. – Muboshgu (talk) 21:23, 26 February 2012 (UTC)

Done. Though it looks to me like it's licensed under the GFDL; it's not in the public domain. — madman 22:22, 26 February 2012 (UTC)

Bot slapps

Is it necessary to tag a copyright violation of another wikipedia article in the very same minute the article is created?[1] Sounds fine for web copies, but a species article will often begin with information from the genus article. In this case, I think the user just made a mistake, while creating the article and using the existing article's taxobox. It might be more welcoming to users to show them how to use the sandbox than to propagate a copyvio all over wikipedia due to a slapp happy bot. 68.107.135.146 (talk) 18:41, 1 March 2012 (UTC)

It is, in case the contributor didn't know. A lot of times this happens due to contributors not knowing how to properly move pages and the template gives guidance on how to do so instead of cutting and pasting it. Plus even if the article is changed after it's created, the revision with which it was created is in violation of Wikipedia's licenses; it's not properly attributing the contributors to the original article, in your hypothetical that being the genus article. So in summary, yes, the notification is necessary; it's best to start with the intended content or at least a bare-bones outline of it instead of another article's content. Thanks, — madman 19:17, 1 March 2012 (UTC)

All that being said, back to the question "is it really necessary to tag a copyright violation of another wikipedia article in the very same minute the article is created?"

Your bot slapp, by the way, did not add the correct attributions; it just added a tag that is now gone. So, the copyright violation, the loss of edit history for the correct licensing of the original article is a permanent situation not dealt with by the bot. So, the bot interfered with the editing of the article, did not correct the problem it is being used for, and what was the value? Oh, maybe suckering me into improving the article--after all, manipulation of editors in a volunteer project should count for something.

Oh well, every time I come to Wikipedia I think I am editing an article and creating an encyclopedia, but, really, all I'm ever doing is racing against the points scored for tagging and deleting articles. Once more, I give up. This is, however, the fastest I have given up in many years of trying. Maybe I can find you a barn star for that. 68.107.135.146 (talk) 19:31, 1 March 2012 (UTC)

My answer, as above, is yes. It is really necessary. And while the bot doesn't know enough to give proper attribution by itself, it reports every tag it places and every tag is reviewed by volunteers who follow up and try to help the page's creator out (or apologize for false positives as necessary). I'm sorry you've been frustrated by this process, but it's necessary to ensure Wikipedia is and will remain a free encyclopedia. — madman 20:23, 1 March 2012 (UTC)

I'm not frustrated. It's just a complete waste of time and interference in editing as so much on Wikipedia is: let's categorized means of doing something instead of correcting problems. No volunteer has reviewed the article, followed up, and given attribution. It's almost the opposite: it's a Streisand effect. The copyright violation, unattributed, is now spread all over Wikipedia courtesy of the bot link, unreviewed, unattributed, but extensively linked. Righteous. 68.107.135.146 (talk) 00:01, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

I didn't say the problem was corrected immediately. No volunteer has reviewed the article yet because those who do such reviews are volunteers; there are only twenty-four hours in a day, and there are lots of tags to go through. Personally, I wait about twenty-four hours before following up as the tags are in fact informative enough that most problems will have been resolved in the meantime. You've stated multiple times now that the bot propagates copyright violations, which is the opposite of what is true. You've also stated that the lack of attribution is a permanent situation, which is likewise untrue. Are you suggesting that if the bot didn't exist and these copyright/licensing violations passed unnoticed and untagged that that'd be better for Wikipedia? — madman 01:45, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

Okay, oblique is going nowhere. You do realize that your bot is assigning a copyright to a bot created boilerplate while it is interfering with a human editor creating an article? The latter is the most important point, however, the text that you tagged as a copyright violation isn't. It's a boilerplate created by a bot, by defintion, not copyrightable.

Yes, it is better for wikipedia to not tag as copyright violations sentences that are not sufficiently original to begin with, "Lower taxon is a member of next higher taxon." It just adds to the copyright idiocy on wikipedia when doing so calls attention to the fact that we have a bot tagging human editors as copyright violators less than a minute after article creation, when the human editor probably just mistakenly hit preview while editing, and did not post anything of substance that could be copyrighted, and the human editor copied and pasted a boilerplate created for a bot who created the article by scrubbing a database to which Wikipedia is attributing copyright.

I read Featured Articles with copyright violations in their main page lead paragraphs. Please put things in perspective.

And let's be fair. If you're going to go after the human editors, PolBot has a 100,000 articles that require your copyviolation bot to hit them. 68.107.135.146 (talk) 16:36, 4 March 2012 (UTC)

Looking into this further, Wikipedia:Copyright violations on history pages seems to imply that the owner of the copyright may complain, but barring that, a copyright violation in the page history isn't a problem. If you had waiting a minute, instead of less than a minute for your bot to tag the article, maybe you could have guessed that PolBot is not going to complain about the copyright violation.

And, if PolBot complains, you can fight that at the source, the bot task that allows it to complain can be strongly contested!

So, I suggest you stop tagging a problem that isn't by tagging "X is a genus of the X family" as copyright violations. 68.107.135.146 (talk) 16:42, 4 March 2012 (UTC)

Bots are notoriously poor at guess-work, so I rather suspect that Madman's bot would have been no more successful at predicting PolBot's reaction after five minutes or fifty than it is in one. The copyright bots on Wikipedia are far more likely to catch actual issues than to flag falsely, but some degree of false flagging is inevitable. I'm sure we all regret the inconvenience of having to remove an incorrect flag, but it's preferable to missing actual copyright issues which can cause legal danger for us and our reusers as well as economically harming copyright holders. --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 17:15, 4 March 2012 (UTC)

But you cannot remove an incorrect flag. Once the bot has flagged the article as a copyright violation, it sits forever in that page of copyright violations--I tried removing it from that page. If you could remove the copyright violation flag then it would be a simple matter of correcting the bot action. But, when there are so many real copyright violations on Wikipedia, leaving a page forever, a page that isn't a copyright violation, in that category is a waste of editing time.

You do good work by the way, Moonriddengirl. You might be surprised how many people know this. 68.107.135.146 (talk) 17:20, 4 March 2012 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you mean by the article being flagged as a copyright violation forever. It's not. It's listed in the page of suspected copyright violations, and if it's a false positive, it's marked as such. The tag is removed and the article is no longer in the category in question. No harm, no foul. I don't think either of us is fully understanding what the other is saying; either that or we're talking at cross purposes. As Moonriddengirl says, any bot is prone to false positives; this bot's benefits, however, far exceed its cost. (I'll also note that I didn't write the bot; I'm just running it since the original operator went MIA). — madman 17:46, 4 March 2012 (UTC)

EC

This is a false positive, and it's not marked as a false positive. The copyright violation tag is forever in the article's history; it's not marked as a false positive there, either. Yet it's not a copyright violation.

Polbot created the text that MadmanBot marked as a copyright violation. Either the text is a copyright violation for being copied by another wikipedia editor or it's not. If it is a copyright violation for a human editor to copy that text from another article, it's a copyright violation for Polbot to copy it from one article to the next. It's about the text, not who copied it. But, it's also about originality (it's not), and about copyright holder.

Wikilawyered to death. You tagged an article as a copyright violation that isn't. You put it on a page identified as possible copyright violations where it doesn't belong. Boilerplate species articles created by bots have no copyright. 68.107.135.146 (talk) 17:55, 4 March 2012 (UTC)