--- The Cunctator <cunctator(a)kband.com> wrote:
Your argument, sir, makes as much sense as mine. The
need for Wikipedia
seeding is highly debatable; and the advisability of
doing it even more
debatable, as the more that bots are used, the less
likely it is that
someone will go back and look at all those bot
entries.
There should be a balance between encyclopedia size
and contributor
participation--the best way to ensure that is to not
auto-generate
entries.
My suggestion was to let bot-seeding happen, but for
those seeds to
remain "hidden" until someone goes and looks for the
information. Take,
for example, [[Leominster, Massachusetts]].
My proposal would be as follows:
1. If you went to [[Johnny Appleseed]], for example,
the link to
Leominster would be in new-page or stub-link format
(? or !), not a
standard link, until someone actually made a change
other than the
Rambot entry.
2. If you click to that link, you see the Rambot
content.
3. If you search for Leominster, the Rambot entry
would show up in the
listing (perhaps tagged).
4. The page wouldn't count in the statistics until
someone's made at
least one edit to the entry.
That way you get the benefit of the content-seeding
without the
distortion of the size or intent of Wikipedia, even
if hundreds of
thousands of such seedings are done.
There's also the side argument that all Rambot did
was take information
that should be in tables and graphs and put it into
paragraph form to
make it seem like Wikipedia style. It probably sould
have done better
just to supply the tables and graphs for eventual
inclusion in real
entries about the towns.
Sounds like a good idea, but I think that should be
for all articles that have only been edited by one
person. We shouldn't single out rambot.
The other thing ist that this (your idea or my
variant, either one) would make the article count jump
down by at least 25,000. This is very significant.
LDan
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