Wikipedia:Bots/News/Next

Bots Newsletter, MM YYYY

Greetings!

Here is the 8th issue of the Bots Newsletter, which presents a summary of what has happened since the last issue. You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future newsletters by adding/removing your name from this list.

Highlights for this newsletter include:

ARBCOM

• Nothing of note happened.

BAG

Two new members have joined the BAG

• ProcrastinatingReader (talk · contribs), operator of ProcBot (talk · contribs) [nomination]
• SD0001 (talk · contribs), operator of SDZeroBot (talk · contribs) [nomination]

Congratulations to both and welcome to the BAG! Also, two BAG members reduced their involvement

• Anomie (talk · contribs) and SQL (talk · contribs) went from active to semi-active.
• Kingpin13 (talk · contribs) went from semi-active to inactive.

BOTREQs and BRFAs

As of writing, we have...

• 31 active BOTREQs, please help if you can!
• 4 open BRFAs and none in need of BAG attention (see live status).
• 99 approved bot tasks since the start of 2020.

Also

• 7 inactive bots have been deflagged (see discussion).

New things

• WP:BOTCOMM requirements have been made more explicit (see discussion, diff).
• WP:BOTDICT contains four new entries: cron, PAWS, Pywikibot, and Toolforge.
• MajavahBot (talk · contribs) creates Bot status reports. Feedback and comments can be directed to User talk:Majavah.
• Pywikibot is up to version 5.1.0. Several legacy features have been dropped, and requirements have been updated as well. In particular, MediaWiki 1.18 and older are no longer supported, and requires Python 3.5 or newer.

Deaths

We are sad to report the deaths of two bot operators

• Hasteur (talk · contribs), maintainer of HasteurBot (talk · contribs) and DRN clerk bot (talk · contribs). Some of their tasks have been taken over by MDanielsBot (talk · contribs).
• Ronhjones (talk · contribs) maintainer of RonBot (talk · contribs). Some of their tasks have been taken over by JL-Bot (talk · contribs).

Users interested in taking over remaining tasks can file a WP:BRFA. You may want to open a WP:BOTN discussion first to find out more about the tasks (including if they are still needed), or open a WP:BOTREQ discussion if you want a specific task to be taken over by a new coder.

Other discussions

These are some of the discussions that happened / are still happening since the last Bots Newsletter. Many are stale, but some are still active.

• Proposal for a 'Cosmetic Bot Day' – of note, many alternatives are also discussed, with the general aim of figuring out what's considered useful and what's considered not useful.
• SDZeroBot 9 is a proposed bot task to track the activity of other bots, and send email or talk page notices to operators when problems occur, such as a crashed bot. Bot operators interested in this should check out the BRFA and the User:SDZeroBot user page for additional details once approved.
• RFC to refine the Global Bots policy on meta – Basically, this is a proposal to "amend the global bot policy to authorize the Wikimedia Stewards to approve uncontroversial bot tasks globally". Details can be found on the RFC page.

Thank you! edited by: Headbomb ~~~

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