[WMF-outreach-staff] Update on FBot

[Asheesh Laroia]

Hello people!

Maybe you'll remember a 15-ish-year-old working with a sometimes-cranky 
Wikipedian named Sven on a bot to "roam the file namespace", from the 
Wikimania Hackathon.

I had made an action item to find out more about what happened with that 
project since then.

It would seem from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Svenbot that Jason 
Spriggs was the spritely youth working on the bot's Java code. Jason had 
put the bot on labs, but the bot has since moved from there back to 
running on Sven's personal computer, and the work Jason did has been 
rewritten by Fastily, the bot's original author.

It does seem that there's some cultural improvement we've caused: Sven now 
insists on having source code for the bot he runs, and having it under a 
free license, so that he can avoid the hackery that Jason went through to 
reverse engineer Fastily's original work.

I don't see the source code to the bot linked anywhere, though. I also 
have trouble finding Jason's code on Github, though I believe he pushed it 
there. He may not have, though; doing that push was one of the last things 
we talked about doing.

That's just my brief status summary to answer a question I asked myself, 
"What happened to that work?"

The parts of this that I really liked were that two Wikipedians 
collaborated, and Jason in particular learned a new skill of bot writing. 
If we want longer-lasting community sticking, then there are ways we could 
vary the event to encourage that.

Hypothetically, one future event could work like, "You're a bot writer. Do 
you want to step up your game? Sign up, and we'll carve out special events 
for you", and then we'd have more buy-in from the people running bots who 
show up. That could be just online, or an in-person track at a future 
Hackathon-type event.

It's also interesting that Jason was excited enough about Labs to put the 
bot there, but Sven finds labs a relatively uncomfortable environment 
(being a Windows user) and prefers to run it locally.

None of this is intended to be normative.

Cheers!

-- Asheesh.