Board Thread:Consensus Track/@comment-25356303-20180124194156/@comment-26074798-20180124223622

Users who run bots definitely need to be sysop, or a helper. We've had users in the past who have known how to run bots, and have used them to make edits that the community has had to revert. Letting anyone with decent bot experience by itself is a bad idea.

To give an example, I learned how to use a bot back in early 2016 (before Atv :D), I would have been an absolutely horrible candidate at having a bot account. I knew how to use the bot, but there were a lot of issues with the idea of letting me do something like that. For example, I was absolutely horrible at following the wiki's editing style guidelines. The user would definitely need to know how the wiki's style and formatting, at the very least.

With the bots having content mod access, if I had to create a set of guidelines on them, here's what I would have, along with the possibility of one of these guidelines not being met. (For example, helpers who wouldn't have edits, but can be trusted)
 * 1) Either be a patroller, admin or helper. In the case of patrollers, they should show extreme aptitude at bots, along with the S&F. In a similar light, Helpers should be tested to make sure they know the S&F before they use a bot.
 * 2) A minimum edit count. For the same exact reasons staff require a minimum edit count of x mainspace edits, users applying should have the same. I personally would range this between 3,000 to 5,000 edits.
 * 3) In a similar step, and also just like staff applications, the user should show the ability to correctly follow policies and S&F. Like I said, we extremely shouldn't have a user who doesn't know what they're doing.
 * 4) The user should be active. We don't need a user who hasn't been around the wiki in 3 years to appear, apply for bot rights, and then leave, never to be seen again.
 * 5) The user should be trustworthy. If we had a user who's done 40,000 edits, but has vandalized or made extremely poor decisions, especially recently, should they be given access to bot tools, where they will have their contributions flagged as hidden?

I've probably missed a thing or two I wanted to include on that list, since my computer crashed and I forgot some things, but that's the list of ideas that I wanted to throw out there that I could think of.