Wikifunctions talk:Bots

Proposed requirement: source code

I suggest that bots should be required to publish their source code under a free license. On Wikidata, where we don’t have this requirement, the closed-source nature of some bots is a repeated and neverending source of pain (I probably shouldn’t name any specific bots here, but I think some people can guess which ones I have in mind). The sooner we add this to Wikifunctions’ bot policy, the better.

Some specific arguments, if anyone needs them:

• Without the source code, it’s impossible for anyone other than the bot operator to determine how exactly the bot behaves. Any missing documentation cannot be filled in by others; the precise nature and cause of bugs can only be guessed at.
• Speaking of bugs, closed-source bots also make it impossible for community members to suggest fixes for bugs, increasing the maintenance burden on the bot operator (who alone is in a position to investigate any issues and implement a solution) and potentially contributing to them losing the energy to run the bot at all.
• And if the bot operator goes missing, retires from the wiki, or for any other reason does not run the bot anymore, nobody else can pick it up. If the bot was providing important functionality, someone else has to reimplement it from scratch.

Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 01:12, 21 December 2024 (UTC)

 Support per all reasons listed plus that it also is in the spirit of only using open source code in production that Wikimedia already has. Ainali (talk) 06:14, 21 December 2024 (UTC)

Making code open source doesn't necessarily mean other people can figure out how to use it, so I would go a step further and say there should also be sufficient instructions for how to set it up and run it.

If a bot operator goes missing, we want the bot to be easy to set up somewhere else. We don't want to have to go through the code to figure out things like what packages it depends on, what the database schema is, what API keys it needs, what data files need to be downloaded, what environment variables need to be set, what command line parameters it expects, what the configuration file should look like, etc.

In my experience, including that information is helpful for the bot operator too, e.g. if they need to move the bot to a new server, or if they haven't run it for a while.

- Nikki (talk) 11:25, 21 December 2024 (UTC)

If we get majority agreement for this it sounds great to me too, I wasn’t sure how far to go with the suggestion ^^ Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 12:23, 21 December 2024 (UTC)

 Support, would also like detailed instructions per Nikki. Feeglgeef (talk) 12:21, 21 December 2024 (UTC)

Done in Special:Diff/156688 (CC @Ainali, @Nikki, @Feeglgeef) – I figured there was enough consensus here to just put something on the page (as the rest of the page still feels somewhat in flux). Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 12:35, 11 January 2025 (UTC)