Mmaarie

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Master thesis on EN Bot Policy

Dear Beland,

I'm currently working on my master thesis which is an analysis of the development of the Bot Policy in the German and English Wikipedia. What I aim to understand is how the policy was developed and how it helped users to coordinate bots.

My main data for the analysis is the talk page of the Wikipedia:Bot Policy project page. I noticed you commenting on various discussions on this talk page and adding a new section in 2005 called "Good Form". However, I have not found the source for this new section as in: where was it discussed to add this section to the policy? Can you maybe help me to understand the process of how the policy evolved? Was it usual to put something on the policy page and in case it wasn't reverted by any other user, it just stayed there?

I would be very happy if you could help me with this :) Kind regards, Mmaarie (talk) 17:50, 1 August 2018 (UTC)

Hmm, I don't remember doing that, which I guess is not surprising since it was about 13 years ago. Yes, that happens sometimes, that people will just post something uncontroversial to a policy page and it will meet general and silent approval. Sometimes people will revert and demand discussion even for relatively uncontroversial things, or for things they don't personally disagree with, which gets a bit tedious. What seems to have happened with the text I added was that it stuck around but got re-edited so the sentiment remains but the text is unrecognizably different. Certainly if I'm adding something substantial or which might be controversial or amended a lot I'll start a discussion on a talk page first; policy pages are supposed to represent consensus and not just be a collection of individual opinions from different editors. Different pages seem to have different cultures. Some are advice pages that seem to welcome new advice freely; others like the Manual of Style are at least theoretically binding on everyone and tend to get argued about in great detail. -- Beland (talk) 03:33, 4 August 2018 (UTC)

Thank you very much! Mmaarie (talk) 09:12, 4 August 2018 (UTC)