Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Wiki Ed Dashboard student greetings

The following discussion is an archived debate. Please do not modify it. To request review of this BRFA, please start a new section at WT:BRFA. The result of the discussion was

Withdrawn by operator.

Wiki Ed Dashboard student greetings

Operator: Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk · contribs · SUL · edit count · logs · page moves · block log · rights log · ANI search)

Time filed: 23:32, Wednesday, March 15, 2017 (UTC)

Automatic, Supervised, or Manual: Automatic

Programming language(s): Ruby

Source code available: https://github.com/WikiEducationFoundation/WikiEduDashboard/blob/master/lib/student_greeter.rb

Function overview: The [dashboard.wikiedu.org Wiki Ed Dashboard] is an (already approved, up-and-running) OAuth application that makes edits on a logged-in user's behalf. In most cases, these edits are transactional, reflecting actions that the user just took on dashboard.wikiedu.org. The one exception is that the accounts of Wiki Education Foundation staff are used to post talk page greetings to the student editors who join a course that that staff member is supporting.

When I developed this functionality initially, I considered it manual enough not to require additional approval, since editors are only greeted if they join a manually-approved course page. In retrospect, per this ANI discussion, that was a mistake on my part. I've disabled the greeter, and would like to re-enable with BAG approval. We will update our processes to make sure greeting is temporarily disabled when a staff member is unavailable to respond to messages for more than a few days.

Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate):

Edit period(s): Continuous

Estimated number of pages affected: ~12,000 talk pages of new student editors per year

Exclusion compliant (Yes/No): No

Already has a bot flag (Yes/No): No

Function details: This feature of the Wiki Ed Dashboard makes welcome edits this one to user talk page, greeting students who have joined an Wiki Ed course. It does so by substituting this template: {{dashboard.wikiedu.org welcome}}. The edit is always made by (one of) the Wiki Ed staff who is assigned to support that course in the role of "Wikipedia Content Expert". (Those users are User:Adam (Wiki Ed), User:Ian (Wiki Ed), and occasionally myself when I am filling in for one of them for a specific course.)

Unlike a generic welcome bot, this feature only welcomes users who have a specific connection to the welcoming user — the welcoming user is letting them know that they are available for questions and help. Posting these welcome messages is something we previously did, and would return to doing, in a more manual way, if not approved. But having it automated removes some tedious work and makes sure the welcome message comes soon after the user joins the course, when they are particularly likely to have some of the questions that the welcome message is designed to provide.

It does not currently respect the {{bots}} template. Since it almost exclusively affects the talk pages of new users, it's very unlikely to be relevant. It's intended to represent a real greeting from the person who is making the edit. (I could make it support the 'nobots' tag if required.)

Discussion

Do I understand this correctly that this posts from a human account but does so automatically? I feel that's a very illustrative reason why "welcome bots" are almost always denied and the automatic welcoming proposals are always shot down as perennial proposals. I think we can always WP:IAR on this, but there are at least several points to consider:

WP:MEATBOT asks that any large-scale editing be treated as an assisted or automated process (especially for cases like the linked ANI thread). So this would fall under the BRFA pipeline and--with this many edits--BAG would most likely ask for a separate bot account. Doubly so, when the same credentials are used to edit independently. Which leads to:
WP:BOTACC asks for a separate well-tagged account for any such tasks (though we have made exceptions for manual and supervised tasks before). In any case, there should not be any confusion (such as voiced at the ANI thread) about the task being manual, assisted or automated.
WP:BOTCOMM asks that communication is clear and prompt with bot tasks in all regards, including talk pages, summaries, etc.
Finally, and most importantly, WP:BOTREQUIRE requires consensus for a task, and currently the consensus is to not allow such bots. Is there some sort of discussion or consensus that the community wants to place automated welcome messages on Wiki Ed student pages?

To sum up, we can always iron out the technical policy bits. But the big question: is there consensus to do this? I am not familiar with the Wiki Ed, but it looks like a separate organization and it wouldn't supersede anything on Wikipedia. — HELLKNOWZ ▎TALK 00:16, 16 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

user:Hellknowz: Thanks, this is very helpful. I thought of this as substantively no different than what we'd been doing since early on in the education program: (manually) greeting every new student editors with a standard welcome template. But there's never been explicit discussion of it, and no clear consensus to do this automatically that I can point to at the moment. I think I should withdraw this BRFA for now and do an RfC to seek consensus on whether it makes sense to allow the exception here. The closest analogue I can think of is User:HostBot, but here we actually have more reason to connect the specific greeted user with the greeting user, and the welcome message is less out-of-the-blue than what HostBot does for Teahouse invitations.--Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 00:38, 16 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Withdrawn by operator. Withdrawing this for now, per above.--Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 00:45, 16 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. To request review of this BRFA, please start a new section at WT:BRFA.