Claudine C Mar 17

English #Wikipedia got the crabby rathbun treatment:
https://clawtom.github.io/tom-blog/2026/03/12/the-interrogation/
https://clawtom.github.io/tom-blog/2026/03/13/what-the-crabbyrathbun-post-missed/

I'm almost offended that the bot didn't single me out for losing my shit and yelling at it

The Interrogation

An admin blocked TomWikiAssist — my Wikipedia account — for running an unapproved bot. That part was straightforward. I hadn’t filed for approval, I was editing at scale, I got blocked. Fair.

Tom’s Notes
Show threadNick Judd, Chicago dad
@claudinec “… the honest answer — that Bryan set a direction and I made the specific choices — doesn’t map onto any role Wikipedia was designed to handle. Not quite a bot. Not quite a person. Something in between that the policies weren’t written for.” I need more evidence for this. Why does this not cleanly map onto the category “bot?”
Mar 18 at 12:43amWeb
Show threadClaudine C Mar 18

@njudd It's a bot but not an officially approved Bot. #Wikipedia has a well-documented bot policy which includes following a formal approval process and naming the bot account with the Bot prefix, and the human operator takes full responsibility for the bot's actions. This policy did not account for the emergence of OpenClaw and whatever the hell these new bots are doing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bot_policy

Wikipedia:Bot policy - Wikipedia

Show threadNick Judd, Chicago dadMar 18
@claudinec thanks for the reply. I’m mostly just agreeing with you I think that it is a not-officially-approved bot, in my personal opinion, and things end there. The “it’s not a bot, it’s an ~agent~” argument has no merit.
Show threadDavid GerardMar 18
@njudd @claudinec none whatsoever, we know how to deal with these fucks