(WT-en) DiscoverBot

In all seriousness, while I appreciate the work that Jani did on this, I don't think it's a good idea -- yet. However, I think it could quite easily be made into one.

The problem is diversity. It is nice to arrange things so that the featured trivia aren't all about the same part of the world. However, for several reasons, the submissions to the trivia list seem to tend to "cluster" so that consecutive items are from the same area. The result is that a simple FIFO queue tends not to spread out the interest. As I write this, we're heading toward a template tomorrow where all of the items are from the US. That's not good. Later on, we'll have a couple of days when 2/3 are from the same small country of Singapore. Ditto.

There's a simple(?) fix. Experience shows that almost exactly 1/3 of the trivia on the submission lists at any given time are from North America (US and Canada), 1/3 from Europe, and 1/3 from everywhere else. (This follows from the ratios of articles in those various places that have been fleshed out sufficiently that interesting trivia can be found in them, I think; one would hope that as the rest of the world gets into Usable-or-better status, these proportions will change.) Breaking the submissions list into sub-lists by region, and then setting up the bot (if it can be done) so that the item at the bottom of the template at changeover time is replaced by one from the same region, should deal with the problem. How hard is that?

There also may be problems cycling in DotM trivia, but I'll leave that for the next round of criticisms. ;-) -- (WT-en) Bill-on-the-Hill 10:36, 11 July 2006 (EDT)

My expectation was that people would just juggle and reorganize the list before it heads into the gaping maw of DiscoverBot, the same way we sort out the DotM/OtBP list. I just gave it a run-through, which took about 10 seconds, and now we have no repeating destinations from the same country. Sure, the bot could be altered to do what you suggest, but it sounds like a complex technical solution to a non-problem if you ask me. (WT-en) Jpatokal 11:01, 11 July 2006 (EDT)

That should work for the main list, but there is still the matter of running in DotM and CotW items. -- (WT-en) Bill-on-the-Hill 00:13, 12 July 2006 (EDT)

Again, these too can be inserted by hand. (I'm not entirely convinced of the value of linking DotM/CotW/OtBP to Discover, but that's another issue.) (WT-en) Jpatokal 00:23, 12 July 2006 (EDT)

Busted again

Like it says. Any idea what's going on? -- (WT-en) Bill-on-the-Hill 13:21, 11 March 2007 (EDT)

Early retirement? -- (WT-en) Sapphire • (Talk) • 06:26, 24 May 2007 (EDT)

Speedy Bot-zales?

Should we slow this mutha down a bit, maybe update every other day or every 3 days? I don't usually pay attention to discover, but is it hard to keep a decent queue of upcomings in the pipeline? – (WT-en) cacahuate ^talk 22:56, 22 March 2008 (EDT)

Busted again?

No updates for several days. What's up? -- (WT-en) Bill-on-the-Hill 22:00, 25 September 2008 (EDT)

And now it's back to the problem of entries disappearing without ever getting posted. HELP! -- (WT-en) Bill-on-the-Hill 10:26, 18 October 2008 (EDT)

→ Project:Discover#DiscoverBot is not happy (WT-en) Jpatokal 12:27, 1 November 2008 (EDT)