What is Fan History? • What are Fan History's goals? • What are Fan History's rules?

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[edit] Kill the bot? Yay or nay?

Just wanted to make this conversation a bit public, rather than just on AIM, so others could participate... Will mirror it on the talk page for the bot.

I'm pretty much for keeping the User:FanFictionNetBot running. I think it would be in the best interest to get as many of those articles added as possible as they give a framework for people to add additional information, rather than waiting for some one else to create them. It also helps generate traffic and interest in the wiki. That's really important, in my opinion, for the long term because we need more contributors. The categories which are a problem can be removed by another bot at a later time... and Sidewinder has been busy building stub articles, adding to the category tree with the system that, at least in terms of fandoms, has been in place for a while and works. I'm of the opinion of keeping it running for as long as we can, as it only has about 25% of FanFiction.Net added. --Laura 18:32, 25 April 2008 (EDT)

I'm also for keeping it running and my reasoning is thus:

* There's a strong momentum/buzz (good and bad) going right now for FH because of the bot. To interrupt it would kill a lot of that momentum.

* Categories and such can always be fixed after the fact. As I was talking to User:Laura about earlier, when it comes down to it most people use wikis by searching more than category browsing. While trying to correctly build category architecture is a good thing, the wiki doesn't fail or isn't unduly harmed if the categories still need work. It is easy enough to use Special:Wantedpages and Special:Wantedcategories to clean up afterwards, even if it involves some time and effort.

* Having lots of new pages added only helps make clearer what an optimized category structure could be. It's hard to plan these things in advance without that data.

* The bot has no effect on certain sections of the site like music fandom, actor fandom, sports fandom, etc which is not represented on ff.n. Therefore those sections can be worked on now without any interference from the bot.--Sidewinder 19:23, 25 April 2008 (EDT)

[edit] Bot run may be finished

I think there are another 50,000 users at this point which could be run. Given that, at this point, it looks like the bot's run is at an end. Getting the most recent additions may be done. We're only up to March 7, 2008 or so at the moment. I need to get a hold of Josh regarding that. --Laura 09:49, 29 May 2008 (EDT)