Drudgery is evil, well written bots save us from drudgery, and allow us to use human time more productively, therefore well written bots are good.
Why should a human clean up whitespace, or add the "cuisine" tag to a hundred "Burger King" branches? Shouldn't our creative brains invest their time elsewhere? I don't think a generic sweeping rule is a good idea. Each bot should be analyzed individually. Badly written bots, the ones that add work rather than save work, should be stopped. Namespace or database separation mean the bots cannot as effectively save us from drudgery. The point of good bots is to save the work that needs to be done on the actual OSM data. However, I do think the "burden of proof" lies on the bot owner; It is the owner's job to explain why the bot is needed, why it is "good", and to document it extensively and make its operations very transparent. I try *very hard* to do that with my scripts. Every single changeset and algorithm is logged at my talk page, all changesets have the bot=yes tag, a dedicated bot user is used, etc. Again, I think every case is to be handled individually, with BOP on the bot owner. bad/undocumented/undiscussed/non-transparent bots are the problem. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:SafwatHalaby#SafwatHalaby_bot _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
