PocKleanBot

Has PocKleanBot vandalised a page?

Is PocKleanBot misbehaving or being abused? Implement hard shutdown (immediate wikipedia IP block)

Who or what is PocKleanBot?

PockBot is a Wikipedia bot, an account on Wikipedia that does not represent the editing activities of a human at a computer keyboard, but of edits carried out by a script (a small computer program). PocKleanBot is developed by User:PocklingtonDan but may be run by any Wikipedia user. Once set running, the bot is fully-automated, without user intervention.

It is not a sock puppet, but rather an automated or semi-automated account for making repetitive edits that would be extremely tedious to do manually.

What PocKleanBot does

PocKleanBot is a Wikipedia bot. It acts as a nag-bot targeting relevant editors' talk pages with notices that articles they have worked on in the past are now flagged as needing cleanup and advising how to tackle this. The list of articles needing cleanup has been getting steadily larger and as of 08:31, 18 October 2006 (UTC), 18,794 articles were tagged for cleanup. Whilst bots aren't much good at cleaning up articles, they can raise a posse of editors to tackle the cleanup. An analogous usage would be the earlier Wikipedia volunteer fire department system.

PocKleanBot would be manually run by any user via a link added to the Wikipedia:Cleanup page. The bot would not allow itself to be run more than once a day. The Bot would find the current month and year and visit the appropriate cleanup list page such as Category:Cleanup from December 2006. It would consult a list of articles it had already been run for and, for any new articles found, it would do 2 things. First, it would start a new section on the talk page for the cleanup team, stating cleanup was needed, suggesting ideas for how to cleanup, etc. Second, it would visit each article's history page and pull a full list of contributors. It would then sort out the 10 most recent editors and the 10 most prolific editors for that article. It would then leave a template message on the talk page of these editors, notifying them that the article in question that they have worked on in the past is in need of cleanup and listing tips for how they could help to achieve this.

Intended use

It is intended that this bot would be run periodically by some of the caretakers of the Wikipedia:Cleanup. The bot could be run by anyone. It would refuse to run if it had been run already in last 24 hours. It is hoped this would prompt community effort on each article by a group of editors with a history of editing that article, leading to swift cleanup.

It would do nothing to remove the backlog of 18,000+ articles but, by helping to ensure swift cleanup of new articles that have the flag added to them, would hopefully mean that articles started getting cleaned up at a faster rate than new articles were getting flagged as needing cleanup.

Example Output

An example of the bots tabular output is as below:

template written to article talk page

(can be edited at Template:PockKleanBotCleanup)

Cleanup Co-ordination

This article has recently been tagged as requiring cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.

The article may have been flagged as needing cleanup because it has been suggested that:

the article needs formatting, proofreading, or rephrasing in comprehensible English.
the article has multiple overlapping problems.
the article is very short and might need expanding, removal or merging with a broader article

For a full list of possible problems see Wikipedia:Manual of Style.

You can use this section to discuss possible resolution of the problem and achieve consensus for action. When there is a consensus that the article is cleaned up please remove the cleanup tag from the article

Discussion

template written to user talk page

(can be edited at Template:PockKleanBotCleanup2)

The article [[{{{1}}}]], to which you have helped contribute, has been flagged as requiring cleanup.

If possible, we would appreciate your assistance in cleaning up this article to bring it up to Wikipedia's quality standards. If you are unsure what the nature of the problem is, please discuss this on the [[{{{1}}}|article]]'s talk page.
If you do not want to receive bot-generated messages on your talk page, please consider using the nobots template on your user talk page

You can see a list of real-world output at Special:Contributions/PocKleanBot.

Bot Status

PocKlean Bot is at the proposal stage so far. I am open to suggestions for improvement and will be requesting bot approval shortly before beginning development.

Development goals

Aim for Version 1.00 to be in trials by end of December 2006

Request for Approval

You can read or add comments on the bot's request for approval page.

Bot Controls

You will be able to run PocKlean bot from here (or the Wikipedia:Cleanup page when it is coded.

Bot maintenance

The bot is maintained by User:PocklingtonDan. Any questions on its operation should be addressed to him.

Bot language

The bot is written in Perl and hosted remotely. If it passes bot approval and sees regular use, i might try and find out about getting it moved to the wikipedia toolserver.

Source Code

When coding starts, the source code for PocKleanBot will be located at User:PocKleanBot/SourceCode. The source code is presented for two reasons:

So that editors with greater experience of Perl and wikipedia may suggest code improvements
So that editors who might wish to run PockBot as a clone (ie mirror PocKleanBot on their own servers) are able to do so (possibly for a foreign-language version - PocKleanBot only works on English Wikipedia).

I grant permission for the distribution and modification of PocKleanBot code for the purposes of editing wikipedia. I would greatly appreciate your feedback and comments for improvement on the code.