User:Fæ/sandbox

Draft request

This request is to have the one account restriction placed on me in 2012, amended to permit bot accounts where these are declared and linked on my main user account pages to show that I am an operator/maintainer and responsible for maintaining them within their authorized scope.

My projects for images have needed quasi-automated changes (e.g. one off batches using VisualFileChange), such as filename corrections, which have affected Wikipedia and many other projects, however it was always within reasonable conventions for cross-project/global improvements to be implemented using my editing account. The project to take the User:Commons fair use upload bot and migrate it to WMFlabs, after the Operator had their accounts blocked, has brought this to a head as this was an established bot task that would be fully automated. I would like to get this running within a few weeks and then promote it again as a service that benefits Wikipedia as it is an easy way to move files away from Commons when their local use can be justified under a Fair Use rationale, most often when a group deletion request on Commons is likely to make actively used photographs or scans unavailable on Wikipedia in multiple languages. At the current time, users either give up and let images vanish from articles or have the complexity of doing local uploads manually, with inevitable delays meaning deletion requests are closed by the time they get around to it, creating unnecessary work for Commons administrators to undelete and redelete, rather than just templating the file for a bot to handle it.

As my various bot projects have been mainly focused on images for the last three years, I cannot imagine a situation where anyone would confuse bot accounts with editors, or editing using my single non-bot account, which would remain the only one used for making edits to English Wikipedia pages not marked as bot edits. At the time of the one-account restriction I was new to creating bot projects, I do not believe it was ever Arbcom's intention to deter me from extending these community supported projects to improving the English Wikipedia as this was not an issue in 2012 and has not been in the years since.