Wikibooks:Reading room/Proposals

Welcome to the Proposals reading room. On this page, Wikibookians are free to talk about suggestions for improving Wikibooks.

Improving interwikis

All of you confirm that WB is one of the Wikimedia projects with the least number of interwikis. What's your solution for increasing the number of interwikis? Doostdar (discuss • contribs) 08:10, 5 August 2024 (UTC)

Hi @Doostdar. I'm afraid I don't understand what you're saying here. Do you have a specific proposal? We are aware of issues with interwikis here, but addressing them is not simple, and I'm not sure anyone here knows the way forward. This is quite a small project at the moment. Cheers —Kittycataclysm (discuss • contribs) 12:41, 5 August 2024 (UTC)

This project already has about 100,000 useful pages and is not a small wiki. I'd rather hear your proposals. I have several proposal, one of them is creating books with similar subpages that is using the same format for all the subpages of a book. In other words a books about jungle animals can include subpages that contain taxonomy, habitat, evoloution, conservation status, food, etc. In this way it would be easier to translate and each subpage can have an equivalent in other WB versions. Doostdar (discuss • contribs) 20:13, 6 August 2024 (UTC)

Enabling meta:Global bots on this wiki

Hi, we've historically disabled global bots on this wiki, because of (I'm guessing) fears about them creating unwanted edits for us to review (not sure about this - couldn't find any on-wiki discussion about this); however, it turns out that global bots already include autoreview meaning that this issue should not happen. I propose we enable them, as this will help global bot operators who don't need to come to this wiki separately to request the bot flag (not that we have many of them anyway) - if we run into problems we can tell the operator not to run it on this wiki or block it if necessary. Leaderboard (discuss • contribs) 17:18, 12 September 2024 (UTC)

I have no problems with this! Out of curiosity, what kinds of things do these global bots do? —Kittycataclysm (discuss • contribs) 18:27, 12 September 2024 (UTC)

@Kittycataclysm Depends. Historically these bots only could fix double-redirects and maintain interlanguage links (which has been redundant now with Wikidata). In 2021, this restriction was removed and any kind of task is now allowed, provided that a global 2-week discussion occurs on whether the community thinks that the bot is good. An example of a global bot is User:InternetArchiveBot, which fixes links that have gone dead. My bot (which is under discussion by the community) is meta:Global reminder bot, reminding users when their temporary rights (like your temp admin) are due to expire so that they can renew. Leaderboard (discuss • contribs) 19:06, 12 September 2024 (UTC)

I'd rather not have global bots here. Engage with the community if you want to use your bots. --Xania ^talk 06:05, 13 September 2024 (UTC)

Unfortunately, I'm not sure I agree with this reasoning. I just don't want our community to be cut off from the resources available to the global community. While I do ideally want people to be engaging with our community directly, the reality is that we are very small, and I don't expect individual bot creators to always come to us directly. I imagine that if we did enable global bots, we would have more of a say in how they are operated as well, forcing engagement between us and the global community, which seems like a good thing. Plus, it seems that global bots are efficient. @Leaderboard if there were specific global bots we didn't like, would we be able to individually disable them here? Cheers —Kittycataclysm (discuss • contribs) 12:22, 13 September 2024 (UTC)

@Kittycataclysm Of course, we can tell the operator not to run the bot, and if that isn't possible for whatever reason, we simply block the bot. Also it's important to note that any new global bot is subject to a 2-week discussion period that's actually advertised via MassMessage (the list of pages that get notified is at m:Bot_policy/New_global_bot_discussion) - so if we want, we can choose to be notified whenever any bot applies for global bot permission. Leaderboard (discuss • contribs) 18:28, 14 September 2024 (UTC)

That sounds reasonable to me. @Xania do you have specifics you can elaborate on regarding your concern? I'd like to better understand your perspective, but I don't from your comment. Cheers —Kittycataclysm (discuss • contribs) 18:33, 14 September 2024 (UTC)

• I support enabling global bots. This wiki is small enough for that. --SHB2000 (discuss • contribs) 12:26, 13 September 2024 (UTC)

This has been done: meta:Steward_requests/Miscellaneous#Enable_global_bots_for_en.wikibooks. Leaderboard (discuss • contribs) 17:01, 28 September 2024 (UTC)