User talk:Novem Linguae/Essays/NPP reform notes

Autopatrol nomination bot

Hope you don't mind me creating this talk page, Novem Linguae. I felt the discussion at Wikipedia_talk:New_pages_patrol/Reviewers#Investigating_the_cause(s)_of_backlogs was drifting a bit far from the topic.

I think this:

Write a bot that automatically makes autopatrol requests for certain editors at WP:PERM/AP - Exact criteria to be determined, but maybe something like 1) 25 articles created in the last 12 months, and 2) less than X percent of them deleted, and 3) the editor has at least Y number of edits or Z account age. The bot would also need to track if the editor has ever been declined for AP before, and not double apply. This approach would be good because we can screen everyone, just like if they had applied for autopatrol themselves.

Is an excellent idea and really needn't wait for an 'emergency' scenario. Such requests would be far more useful than the average self-request we get now (which are well-meaning but don't tend to affect the backlog awfully much) and, since nothing significant would happen without manual admin approval, quite low-risk. The worst thing that could happen is that the bot will annoy the regular admins at WP:PERM/A, which recently has been me, Schwede66, Femke, and Sohom Datta (so pinging for input). Personally I'd be fine with it, because the bot would eliminate a lot of similar manual searching I do now, freeing up time to process the automated requests.

I would only add that, until we've got through the initial backlog, it would be good to add a limit of N requests per day and/or have the bot pause if the unprocessed backlog at WP:PERM/A is too long.

Do you or perhaps Sohom Datta or MPGuy2824 have the capacity to develop such a bot? – Joe (talk) 12:49, 7 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Joe, I haven't created any bots (yet), but I'll ping DR who has. -MPGuy2824 (talk) 12:52, 7 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Happy to help with this. Please let me know once there is consensus to proceed. – DreamRimmer (talk) 17:12, 7 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think that's a good plan. Why don't we workshop here the exact criteria that the bot will use to pick who to nominate, and then after we can post it at WT:PERM for consensus, and then after we can have DR code it up? Would anyone like to start us off with the suggested bot algorithm / criteria to use to pick who to nominate? Above I suggested 1) 25 articles created in the last 12 months, and 2) less than X percent of them deleted, and 3) the editor has at least Y number of edits or Z account age and Joe suggested N requests per day if anyone would like to fill in the blanks. –Novem Linguae (talk) 18:32, 7 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

That's a good plan. For requirements, I'd say:

1) minimum 25 total, of which 12 in last year

2) maximum 0 deletions in last 20 articles

3) minimum 4,000 edits, minimum 9 months of account age.

I can imagine it would be a large group, especially in the beginning. If it's easy to code up, we might want to prioritise people with GAs, as they're more likely to have a decent understanding of key policies around NPOV/BLP etc. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 11:08, 8 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

These sound good to me too. In particular I strongly agree that NL's X should be 0, at least to start with. However, it would be good to get some numbers on how many accounts meet the criteria for different values of Y and Z, and how many of them are already autopatrolled, so we know what we're getting ourselves into. I will try to write a quarry query for it but I'm super snowed under right now so if anyone can do it faster it'd be appreciated. – Joe (talk) 08:11, 10 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I've just discovered that there actually used to be a bot that did this, though unfortunately it doesn't seem the source code is available. – Joe (talk) 09:24, 7 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]