User talk:Cobi/Archives/2015/July

Questions for a story on Popular Mechanics

Hey Cobi,

I'm a writer for Popular Mechanics and I just wanted to reach out to ask you a couple of questions about ClueBot after seeing its info page get a whole bunch of attention on Reddit!

I'll try to be brief.

What got you interested in working on a vandalism detection bot for Wikipedia?

What's the best part of working on ClueBot?

The worst?

If there was one thing you'd want the general public to know about ClueBot or bots on Wikipedia in general, what would it be?

You can just respond to me here, or email me at elimer@hearst.com if you'd rather. I hope I am using the talk page correctly; I'll confess I'm not much of a Wikipedian which is perhaps why this interests me!

Thanks!

-- Ericlimer (talk) 02:59, 25 June 2015 (UTC)

I got interested in working on a vandalism detection bot because I had originally been quite active in the IRC scene, and had written many bots for IRC. I originally wondered if I could put the things I learned from writing IRC bots toward writing a bot for Wikipedia and I thought it would be an interesting challenge. At the time I didn't really know much about bots on Wikipedia, but I quickly found that there was an API and a group for approving bots on Wikipedia. I decided that an anti-vandalism bot would be an interesting challenge and something that would be needed by Wikipedia, if not direly then, especially as it grew. That was back when I wrote the original ClueBot.

The best part of working on the original ClueBot was that everyone was welcoming and it was very easy to try things and see if they worked; and it is a great feeling to feel like you are making a difference in a large project such as Wikipedia.

The worst part was probably the vocal minority that were opposed to anything automated reverting things; and, though not directly related to the bot, my RfAs I went through to become a Wikipedia admin were quite nerve-wracking.

As far as ClueBot NG, the best part of that was the collaboration with my good friend, Crispy1989, who is an expert in machine learning. There is a lot of cool machine learning in ClueBot NG.

The worst part of the ClueBot NG era was probably the vetting that ClueBot NG had to go through. Compare this request for approval of the original ClueBot with this request for approval of the new ClueBot NG (be sure to expand the collapsed discussion) to see what I mean. That being said, that wasn't bad at all.

As far as one thing for the general public to know about Wikipedia: There is a lot of work that goes on "under-the-hood" that I bet a lot of people don't understand. There are parts of Wikipedia that I am not entirely familiar with myself, even. And it's all done by volunteers. And if anyone wants to help out, it's not hard to get started. There is no cabal.

-- Cobi^(t|c|b) 03:50, 27 June 2015 (UTC)

ClueBot NG revert ID malfunction

Please see this reversion by ClueBot NG. It is clearly a false positive, but note that the Revert ID is 0. Therefore the normal false-positive-reporting mechanism didn't seem to work. --174.88.133.209 (talk) 22:09, 2 July 2015 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) it's under investigation.--5 albert square (talk) 22:14, 2 July 2015 (UTC)