User:Knife Maker/Bot maintenance

Bot methodology:
The goal is full transparency and deliberation, so that folks understand they and not the bots are in control. No one wants to contribute to a site where arbitrary actions are taken by faceless bots that they have no say over.

Procedure: Warning method #1

 * Do your first pass on the set of problem articles. Add a template with a warning message.  The warning message instructs the user to remove the template if they disagree with the proposed action, offers multiple lines of communication:
 * Page that exhaustively lists all pages that will be affected so that folks can quickly identify other problems they disagree with.
 * Exception/Not applicable Talk page- directs user to a talk page to briefly state why the article should be exempted.
 * Page presenting the Guidelines or policy that the Bot is implementing. Anyone with global issues about the policy may debate/ present their POV on the talk page.
 * After a period of time agreed upon with admins has expired, on the second pass the bot performs the proposed transformation.

Task: Living People

 * walk all articles. For articles on individuals,
 * If birth date of indivdual can be determined from article with near certainty
 * Do Warning procedure pass
 * Add Template:Living to all pages that were not exempted.

Spam

 * visit all pages, eliminate link to the site if it is on a banned list. Elimination may have some issues.
 * It is easy to break the link- just remove the http junk and leave the display text.
 * It's harder to eliminate more, since you don't know how much of the text accompanying the link is promotional/ should be deleted. Could remove the whole line if it is in a link section/ looks like a bulleted item.  But problematic if it is embedded in the article text.  Sorry, but bots really shouldn't muck with text unless it has high certainty of what it is doing.
 * Walk the tree of all edits for a given user and eliminate whatever links they added.
 * Detection: visit all pages, compile a list of domains with links. Post the list as a page giving each domain, the numbers of links- whether they are to an identical page, what the change is in the last week/ two weeks/ months.