All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part XX

[GethN7]

Changing gears to ATT business, I think I can save Rob Kelk a lot of tedious hassle.

I know he has a MASSIVE list of images to properly tag with templates and categories, and unless it will not admit any delay, he can just send me a huge plain text document (in either UTF-8 or ANSI formatting) of each category of images needing what tags (just a list of pagenames starting with "File:" in order, no spaces or numbering), and I can feed that into Gethbot and mark them all up in one shot, confirmed the latest AutoWikiBrowser version syncs fine to Miraheze's MediaWiki API, recently ran a bot job to clean up the disambiguation pages to remove some redundant markup the templates had already added.

As for the images needing deleted, that is possible to do by Gethbot, but is likely better done by hand.

If Rob still wants to do that all by hand, fair enough, but if he'd like to save a bit more time to do other things, Gethbot is ready to automate the work in question.

[robkelk]

Considering that I need to go into each image description page in order to determine which license and categories need to be added, it will be just as fast to continue adding them manually while I'm in there.

Thanks anyway.

(As for the images needing deleted... we don't have any.)

[Bob Schroeck]

Okay, Cwf1997 has been busy since his ban expired. I gave him a pass on a couple borderline cases of trope misuse, but Utini501 found several I would call significant in his recent edit to Batman: Arkham Knight/YMMV that I missed due to unfamiliarity with the source material and the community around it.

Could other staff please review Utini501's corrections to Cwf1997's edits and weigh in on whether the original errors are sufficient to trigger his permanent ban? i do not feel comfortable making that determination by myself.

[GethN7]

Okay, Cwf1997 has been busy since his ban expired.  I gave him a pass on a couple borderline cases of trope misuse, but Utini501 found several I would call significant in his recent edit to Batman: Arkham Knight/YMMV that I missed due to unfamiliarity with the source material and the community around it.

Could other staff please review Utini501's corrections to Cwf1997's edits and weigh in on whether the original errors are sufficient to trigger his permanent ban?  i do not feel comfortable making that determination by myself.

I played Arkham Knight, yeah, guy needs a boot. We've gone out of our way to warn him to do it right and he's made a point to continually screw up. If anyone wants to avoid bringing the hammer down too hard but still wants to make the displeasure with their stubborn ignorance clear, a block of no less than a full year should suffice in my view. Otherwise, perma-banishment sounds fine if you guys do not believe even a year would give them time to wise up.

[robkelk]

We told him what would happen if he continued to screw up. He continued to screw up.

If we don't do what we said we'd do, we open ourselves up to accusations of playing favourites.

He's now perma-blocked.

[GethN7]

We told him what would happen if he continued to screw up. He continued to screw up.

If we don't do what we said we'd do, we open ourselves up to accusations of playing favourites.

He's now perma-blocked.

Sounds fair to me.

Edit: Bob, soon as you have those IRC deets, I'll contact Libera.

BTW, spoke with Brent regard the Variables extension, he concurs it could be a later issue but we can cross that bridge later, but he's aware of the problem and it's not a super immediate issue, though he has considered alternatives to address things and I'll defer to him on this.

[Bob Schroeck]

Oh, right, gotta do that.


EDIT: And done. I now have the registered nick of "LooneyToons" (no space) on Libera.chat.

[GethN7]

Oh, right, gotta do that.


EDIT:  And done.  I now have the registered nick of "LooneyToons" (no space) on Libera.chat.

Thank you, I'll courier the deets to Libera by the end of tomorrow.

[Umbire]

...Alright, now that I've had a good night's sleep and some breakfast being prepped, let's get through all of this, shall we?

So, I haven't commented much lately, but let me start with saying that the Fandom decision is pretty bad. What GethN7 posted was terribly ignorant, but people are ignorant on the internet all the time and they don't ban all of those people. Instead of trying to correct someone who was trying to follow the rules after years of service, they just banned him. This is cancel culture at his dumbest.

Yeah, this doesn't track at all in my mind, especially considering the following:

I would agree that Geth should have been given the opportunity to prune his views off the post first before being banned. The pointing out of the views and how he's having to stifle them because of the local rules was, shall we say, absolutely and utterly unnecessary even in the context. It doesn't help prove the point in the discipline he was metting out, and indeed may have also harmed his position because, "well, maybe you should be fighting for me instead of asking me to follow these 'asinine' rules."

Precisely. Nothing obligates him to share his views publicly, and lest we forget: that he can doesn't mean he should.

Beyond that, if a user on ATT flouted openly and repeatedly about following "inconvenient" rules while doing nothing to actually suggest or facilitate improvement, I get the feeling they would be unceremoniously booted - and rightfully so.

This is to say nothing of being in a position to enforce said rules, as it then begs the question of why one would bother taking the position if they could not put their views aside for the community's good - I would think we saw TVTropes's decline as a result of what happens when you cannot divorce the two.

But let's go back to the ignorance. What he wrote shows he hasn't thought things through that much. You didn't even define transgender correctly; no hormones or body alteration is required to be trans. Do you even know any trans people, Geth? I have three friends, and three more acquaintances, who are trans women. You didn't think about it from their perspective, obviously. But you're failing at the religious perspective, too. First principles is: "Love the Lord your God and love your neighbors as yourself." Does what you said show love to these people? I think it fails at that. There is perhaps an argument to be made on the last clause about whether trans people love themselves, but that's neither here nor there because it's honestly not your business. You know what can overcome "immutable reality"? Faith, that's what. Sheesh.

+1 - for being such a stickler about beliefs, it seemed incredibly convenient to dispose of that particular one when the opportunity arose.

Bringing up your views as "noted reservations" wasn't being obedient in this case. They don't stop you from having the views and ideology, they just make it clear they don't want the views and ideology expressed on their site. If they wanted you to stop having the views and be a "mindless drone", they'd be attacking you anywhere you express it, rather than just showing you the door.

Hard +1.

I believe you're not the first one to be banned for such expression, but I'm sure they've had enough of trying to give chances and having the chances wasted, and they're through wasting the time presenting the chances to begin with.

I agree. See also the proliferation of shoddy anonymous edits that was cited as the rationale for disallowing anonymous editing altogether.

[...]this has still removed a key condition for the FANDOM fork being allowed to use the All The Tropes trademark. I will point this out where everyone can see it: it is not the fault of the fork that the license is now in jeopardy of being pulled. Nor is it technically the fault of FANDOM, even with the "no second chances" drop of the banhammer.

But for this I might've been tempted to let this entire thing sit, or at least not harp on about it as long - as it stands, I had to read about a cease and desist being considered for an affiliate that lost the copyright to the ATT name due to being put in an unfavorable position through no real fault of their own.

That hasn't sat well with me, quite honestly, and in addition to adding a name to my own ignore list, I have to give serious thought to what actions I should take regarding my own contributions to troping moving forward. This is not something I particularly enjoy having to make known - but as it happens, my /own/ beliefs make it very difficult for me to sit on my hands instead of acting on what I know.

[GethN7]

For reasons of transparency, here is the communications I have had thus far with Libera:




[Libera.Chat #3448] AutoReply: Would like to register the All The Tropes Wiki project with Libera
Libera.Chat Projects & Community Team <projects@libera.chat>
Mon 7/12/2021 3:20 PM
To: arcane@live.com <arcane@live.com>
Greetings,

This message has been automatically generated in response to the creation of a
project registration support ticket regarding:

"Would like to register the All The Tropes Wiki project with Libera".

A member of the Projects and Community team will be in touch as soon as
possible. This ticket has been assigned number:

[Libera.Chat #3448]

Please include it in the subject line of future messages about this issue.

Thank you for choosing Libera Chat!

projects@libera.chat

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Main_Page
[https://static.miraheze.org/allthetropes.../Main_Page>
All The Tropes<https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Main_Page>
All The Tropes is a community-edited wiki website dedicated to discussing Creators, Works, and Tropes-- the people, projects and patterns of creative writing in all kinds of entertainment: television, literature, movies, video games, and more. And by all kinds of entertainment, we don't just mean English language content (especially just American English content), we want to cover and address ...
allthetropes.org


Verification of Staff here:

https://allthetropes.org/wiki/All_The_Tropes:Contact_us
All The Tropes:Contact us - All The Tropes<https://allthetropes.org/wiki/All_The_Tropes:Contact_us>
We handle all of the typical day-to-day business of the wiki such as dealing with abuse, banninations, and DMCA requests. The easiest way to contact us fast as a group is in the #allthetropes channel on irc.freenode.net.
allthetropes.org

Note: IRC information listed this is outdated, updated information provided below.

# About your community
Your community name(s): All The Tropes
Your community description: Talking about tropes, the works they're used in, and how to use them in your own works
Can we list your community publicly, such as on the libera.chat website:
Libera Chat staff member you have discussed this registration with: Yes

# About you and your staff
Your NickServ account: GethN7, LooneyToons
Your relationship / affiliation with the community: Staff
NickServ of group contacts and if their status is hidden/public: public

# Channels and cloaks (see below)
Channels you'd like to claim: #allthetropes and #allthetropes-*
(typically #communityname and #communityname-*)
Would you like ONLY group contacts to be able to register these channels with
ChanServ?: Yes
(The cloaks will be formatted like this:
about/YourCommunityNameHere/name or about/YourCommunityNameHere/role/name)

[GethN7]

The MediaWiki API seems to hold up for short jobs (my bot had issues at times on earlier versions of AutoWikiBrowser having connection issues, they seem to have fixed that), I'm going to leave it on to do some general cleanup of pages for grammar and spacing issues overnight and see how well it handles sustained usage over several hours, just in case we need to do something like altering something more specific on several thousand or more pages soon.

To be specific, I set the bot to do grammar cleanup by fixing these kinds of errors

1. Stuff like [[Badass|badasses]] -> [[badass]]es
2. Spacing and dating screwups.

If anyone want to get a good idea of what is happening, just tell recent changes to show bot edits and check the diffs.

I want to test and see how well it works over a sustained period in case we need to do things like massive markup/link changes, want to make sure my bot won't die with a heavy load. Earlier AWB versions had to restart after gagging on heavy load at times, want to see just how much better that was improved.

[robkelk]

2. Spacing and dating screwups.

Meaning what, exactly?

If the bot's going to put two blank lines between sections on all those pages where I've manually removed them, I'm going to get upset.

If the bot's going to replace ISO-standard dates with USA-style dates, I'm going to get very upset.

[Bob Schroeck]

I fully support task 1. Task 2... until you explain what you're considering "screwups" and what your corrections will be, I have some reservations.

[robkelk]

The only edit that your bot made to "Blue Sphere" here broke sentence formatting. "passwords—one" is not a word. Please correct your rules and run the bot again so that it reads "passwords — one", with the necessary spaces.

EDIT: And I am upset that you unilaterally chose to make this change. Please consult with other Tropers before changing the look-and-feel of the site again.

[robkelk]

You broke categories on BlazBlue - you replaced "[[Category:{{PAGENAME}}]]" with "[[Category:BlazBlue]]".

[[Category:{{PAGENAME}}]] is the preferred format, and is also the format used in the new-page templates. I have been fixing those manually on existing pages every time I see them for years. I don't appreciate a bot coming in and re-breaking them.

EDIT: I have blocked Gethbot for one day, for the protection of the wiki, with the reason "Repeatedly breaking something that a mod had to step in to fix"

RE-EDIT: I need from you a list of all pages where your bot removed [[Category:{{PAGENAME}}]], so that we can go in and fix the damage you did.

[GethN7]

You broke categories on BlazBlue - you replaced "[[Category:{{PAGENAME}}]]" with "[[Category:BlazBlue]]".

[[Category:{{PAGENAME}}]] is the preferred format, and is also the format used in the new-page templates. I have been fixing those manually on existing pages every time I see them for years. I don't appreciate a bot coming in and re-breaking them.

EDIT: I have blocked Gethbot for one day, for the protection of the wiki, with the reason "repeatedly breaking something that a moderator had to step in to fix"

Thank you for doing that.

I cut short the use of AWB last night just in case it did too much it shouldn't. It was coded based on fixing mistakes on English Wikipedia, and while I tried to ensure it fixed only really basic stuff, I had no idea it was breaking things it shouldn't.

{{PAGENAME}} is a generic "magic word"" used to call the actual name of the page, so "BlazBlue" would actually be correct by that measure in a technical sense, so I had no idea it caused a breakage of what it should not, that is genuine news to me, so thank you for intervening to protect the wiki.

From now on, I'll further restrict generic cleanup jobs to more specific rules to avoid this. Also, I'll fix the damage from Gethbot on that score.

This can be fixed easily with this, I'll ask Miraheze to fix it in one shot, with this:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:RollbackEdits.php

Edit: Filed this, it will fix it all in one shot far more efficiently than can be done by hand:

https://phabricator.miraheze.org/T7635

[robkelk]

From now on, I'll further restrict generic cleanup jobs to more more specific rules to avoid this.

Please give us a list of those rules and get sign-off before you implement them, so that you don't break anything else.

[GethN7]

From now on, I'll further restrict generic cleanup jobs to more more specific rules to avoid this.

Please give us a list of those rules and get sign-off before you implement them, so that you don't break anything else.

Will do from now on.

In fact, I'm going to fix my mistakes myself since it seems they had issues on their end fixing via the backend.

[Bob Schroeck]

While we're on the topic, whose bot is "Maintenance Script"?  It's just dumped a whole bunch of changes into the Moderation Queue.  Checking a few at random, along with a few approved change from its recent history, I have a lot of concerns about what it's doing:

• It's adding new, nonexistent categories to pages, like "Funny (animation)" on Mission Hill/Funny.
  
• It's unnecessarily converting spaces in file names to underscores (such as seen on Category:Animal Tropes).  Mediawiki handles that just fine already.
  
• The {{disambiguation}} template already includes the __DISAMBIG__ magic word -- it doesn't need to be appended to disambiguation pages that appear to lack it.
  
• Any time it changes "Watchmen (comics)" to "Watchmen", it's changing a direct link to a specific work to a disambiguation page.
  
• For some reason, on some pages -- like Tombstone/YMMV -- it's changing the proper page template to a wrong one.
  

And that's just from a couple minutes' review.  I'm going follow Rob's lead and block Maintenance Script for a day while I go through its history and the mod queue and undo/reject anything that's obviously wrong.

EDIT: The only edit summary Maintenance Script uses is "Request". Whose request? What was requested?

[GethN7]

While we're on the topic, whose bot is "Maintenance Script"?  It's just dumped a whole bunch of changes into the Moderation Queue.  Checking a few at random, along with a few approved change from its recent history, I have a lot of concerns about what it's doing:

• It's adding new, nonexistent categories to pages, like "Funny (animation)" on Mission Hill/Funny.
  
• It's unnecessarily converting spaces in file names to underscores (such as seen on Category:Animal Tropes).  Mediawiki handles that just fine already.
  
• The {{disambiguation}} template already includes the __DISAMBIG__ magic word -- it doesn't need to be appended to disambiguation pages that appear to lack it.
  
• Any time it changes "Watchmen (comics)" to "Watchmen", it's changing a direct link to a specific work to a disambiguation page.
  
• For some reason, on some pages -- like Tombstone/YMMV -- it's changing the proper page template to a wrong one.
  

And that's just from a couple minutes' review.  I'm going follow Rob's lead and block Maintenance Script for a day while I go through its history and the mod queue and undo/reject anything that's obviously wrong.

That was from the botched attempt to fix everything via the backend I requested, the script was a bit overzealous, which is why I rolling back all the screwups by hand. Tell Moderation queue to auto-reject anything by it (should have just done that myself), this needs a manual fix, which can be done by hand very accurately.

[Bob Schroeck]

Oh, okay. No prob then. God knows, when I was using a bot to do mass changes a few years back I had my share of coding issues and errors I had to fix by hand after the fact, so I'm not going to give you any crap over that.

[GethN7]

Oh, okay.  No prob then.  God knows, when I was using a bot to do mass changes a few years back I had my share of coding issues and errors I had to fix by hand after the fact, so I'm not going to give you any crap over that.

On July 13th, Gethbot (my bot account) made some automated fixes that wound up screwing up more than they fixed. I have, by hand, rolled all those edits back to their antebellum condition before the incident.

That said, this was my mistake, and I own that. Any punishment or penalty deemed appropriate I accept without issue, I take full responsibility for my errors.

That said, I propose we have some new rules for our bot policy going forward.

1. No matter who owns a bot account or the nature of the edits intended, all bots not running regular services (as in, constant) of a known nature (like InternetArchiveBot) must have the bot owner submit all technical information requested on the proposed fixes, including their specific changes in all details and the scope of pages, categories and namespaces affected. All staff must approve of these changes or at least a majority. This applies to all bot jobs done on an "as needed" basis. No "ex post facto" justification is allowed for any ATT user, all proposed changes must be agreed upon by staff consensus at a bare minimum PRIOR to the bot job duration.

For constantly running bot services providing ongoing service of known useful utility, such as preventing link rot and other preapproved tasks, they will otherwise be exempt from this policy until such time they need to modify it to do services outside the pre-approved remit they were authorized, in which instance they must still submit all needed information for prior staff approval before it will be allowed to proceed in either the short or long-term.

2. No "generalized fixes" that would damage ISO standard dating, American/British spelling, or any other changes like that provided by our existing page templates can be allowed. The only exceptions are those agreed on as necessary by appropriate review prior and even then the scope must be strictly circumscribed in accordance with bot policy.

3. If a bot causes an issue, the bot owner is fully responsible for fixing all mistakes made in good faith. Confirmed malicious use of a bot for any reason is immediate grounds for the permanent expulsion of the bot owner and their bot account from All The Tropes. As for good-faith mistakes, they must still be immediately subject to any penalties deemed appropriate by the staff of ATT, depending on the difficulty of repairing the scope of any damage. Any staff who have made either good-faith or malicious mistakes are not exempt by any means, they must suffer the consequences the same as any other user depending on the nature of the damage, how easily it was reversible, done, and intention.

Note, if such penalties include a temporary block from using ATT services, the bot owner must still be obligated to fix any mistakes they made, if feasible and appropriate, before the imposition of such a penalty, but only if the bot owner made the mistakes in legitimate good faith. Malicious use will not allow for this and should be fixed by staff.

4. If the bot uses an automated wiki tool like PyWikipediaBot, AutoWikiBrowser, or Perl's MediaWiki bot script (among other tools), none of their built-in functions that provide "generalized" fixes based on Wikipedia's specific standards can be allowed, unless none of those would break any of the aforementioned rules or any existing mandated ATT template and page code, and any purposeful circumvention of this after the adoption of this rule will be considered the same as malicious vandalism and be dealt with as specified in the previous rule.

5. Archival records may be requested and made available for all bot jobs done on an "as needed" basis and will be archived in a place mutually decided on by staff that are visible to all ATT users, in the interests of transparency, barring certain jobs done for technical or legal reasons that may involve private information or other legal situations that require confidentiality.

6. Miraheze staff are the only parties who, for technical and legal reasons, are allowed to circumvent any of the above since they are the owners of our current hosting service, and if any of our rules conflict with theirs, then theirs take precedent.

If anyone has further suggestions to make sure all bot use going forward prevents further incident, I heartily endorse it and would be willing to set an example by being the first party subjected to any penalty for this recent incident. My intentions were in good faith and were fixable, but they still caused issues, and thus whenever these rules are finalized or not, I still wish to set an example of being responsible for my error in this incident.

[robkelk]

Do we want to include a list of pre-approved bot runs? I haven't been asking for permission to change links to redirects so that they point at the actual pages, but under this proposal I'd need to start asking. (That's the only change that I'd want pre-approved that I can think of at the moment.)

[GethN7]

Do we want to include a list of pre-approved bot runs? I haven't been asking for permission to change links to redirects so that they point at the actual pages, but under this proposal I'd need to start asking. (That's the only change that I'd want pre-approved that I can think of at the moment.)

That might be a prudent idea for transparency reasons, just so there is no ambiguity later.

Edit: I can't think of any more rules for the proposed draft of the new Bot policy. Unless anyone else has further suggestions or additions.

[Bob Schroeck]

After a close read-through, I can't think of anything more at this time. Such declarations have never stopped us from finding things to add after the fact, but that's no reason not to put it up on the wiki as a proposal right away.