How does simply having what is basically a placeholder entry for each town/village/city etc. alleviate systemic bias? Most of these articles will be ignored completely after creation, while those that are expanded and improved will reflect the factors that led to systemic bias in content initially. As to the proposal itself, I don't think its a big deal. I also don't think its of much value - if it works out to be mainly one or two line stubs, what encyclopedic value does that really add? Only people who already know that a town exists and what country its in will search for it, right? The one reference is nice, and the links to maps (if its on all stubs) is cool, but still. Creating 2 million more articles that won't be touched for a decade seems unnecessary and doesn't really bring much actual knowledge to the 'pedia, but aside from damaging the hell out of my random article patrolling it doesn't appear to present a serious problem either. As to random article patrolling, its past time that there was a way to restrict this "randomness." Mostly I look for unreferenced and uncategorized BLPs, and if I could exclude all articles categorized as towns/villages/cities etc. that would really help. Is there already a way to do that? Nathan

2008/6/1 Nathan <nawrich(a)gmail.com>om>: I think you're dead wrong there. How many Rambot articles are untouched? [citation needed] - d.

2008/6/1 Nathan <nawrich(a)gmail.com>om>: They're being created with considerable human review and the active involvement of the relevant country WikiProjects, which should help. I think a lot of that is that they look more substantial than they are, because of the data being rendered as prose. There are still many US town articles that have been substantially expanded but still have an unedited blob of Rambot output in there. - d.

2008/6/1 Todd Allen <toddmallen(a)gmail.com>om>: He'll be working through the WikiProjects, as has been noted (and on the explanation pages). You appear to be saying you're going to work in opposition to them just because you can. Surely not. - d.

On Sun, Jun 1, 2008 at 11:01 AM, Nathan <nawrich(a)gmail.com> wrote: If there's consensus, then there is, and I'll go by it. I'll have to look into it a bit further. I just remember the garbage Rambot wrote, and I'd sure prefer not to see that on a larger scale. If this is better designed, then so it is, but I remain skeptical about bots writing articles. -- Freedom is the right to say that 2+2=4. From this all else follows.

Todd Allen schreef: What is your opinion about, for example, [[Ortonovo]], an article created by a bot 2 years ago, and not changed since then? The major problem with the bot is that there may be more detailed databases on national level, while Fritz's bot uses only the data from a global database. But his last message on [[Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/FritzpollBot creating millions of new articles#Motion to recess by the operator]] indicates that he will also take a look at the individual countries, which shows he has the right attitude. Eugene

--- Nathan <nawrich(a)gmail.com> wrote: The bot was technically approved, by whichever half a dozen people were involved in the bot approval process at the time. The bot approval committee doesn't reallly have the ability to speak to the wider issues at stake here, that being the effect of the creation of 2 million stub articles, which is why the issue is now being discussed on a wider scale. The bot hasn't actually already started, it has created 100 test articles.

2008/6/1 bobolozo <bobolozo(a)yahoo.com>om>: That doesn't really serve as a justification for express systematic bias (rather than the default systemic bias). - d.

2008/6/1 Todd Allen <toddmallen(a)gmail.com>om>: All towns are "notable." - d.

2008/6/4 Todd Allen <toddmallen(a)gmail.com>om>: "Lists could handle it far better"? I think that falls equally under "oft-repeated but by no means true" ;-) Let's consider a few metrics. * Informational content - about even. A one or two-line article (name, location, coordinates) can easily be replicated as a table without losing any amount of information, or vice versa. (Indeed, there is a case to be made for having both, the way I think we have with French villages) * Development potential - seperate articles are much better, because tables are horrendous to edit for a new user. Even for an experienced user happy with the format, there's not really any way *to* expand our basic gazetter entry if it's a line in a table - you can't really add a chunk on at the side. With a seperate article, on the other hand, it's about as simple as it can be. * Ease of maintenance - lists are much better. Only one article need be watched for vandalism, bot updates can be done in one edit, etc, (One small caveat: it does create potential confusion due to the hundreds of redirects - if the lists are reorganised, will all the redirects get moved?) * Utility to reader - seperate articles are marginally better. As mentioned above, the actual amount of content is the same for a line in a list as for a stub article. The difference is that if you click on [[Jandaba, Georgia]] and get a stub you get the content presented to you immediately, whereas if you get a list you have to poke around to find it. Given all this, I really don't see a clear case that combined lists handle this sort of thing better - each has one clear plus point, but to my mind the expansion potential more than outweighs the maintenance benefit. We can make a much better case for using lists when thinking of things like asteroids, where the known information is both limited and very unlikely to be significantly expanded in the normal course of events. However, given that there *is* information out there on the town of Jandaba*, and we would quite like people to write about it, using the method that encourages them to do so seems advisable... -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk * or would be, if it existed; "Jandaba" is apparently the placeholder name for a generic place in Georgian. It's educational, this list, y'know.

Joe Szilagyi wrote: Or loosen up a bit on what warrants an article to allow the rest of the encyclopedia to grow to the same relative size. From my understanding of how random page works it wouldn't be easy to "weight" it this way.

2008/6/4 Stephen Bain <stephen.bain(a)gmail.com>om>: Mmm... yes and no. I have a gut assumption that basically says "the fewer articles, the easier it is to monitor them"; it may not be a very strong connection compared to how it was Back In The Day, but I think the relationship is still there. Listing does have the subtle advantage here that you *know* you're going to get all the entries - with individual articles, it's relatively easy to lose a few in your later updates. Anyhow, you're supporting my position, I won't argue back too much :-) -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

On Wed, Jun 4, 2008 at 6:05 PM, Anthony <wikimail(a)inbox.org> wrote: Some more on this, read http://www.maplandia.com/terms-of-use/ This isn't even an open source or non-profit project we're talking about adding millions of links to. And Encara...Microsoft...I'm amazed I'm the only one raising an objection to this.

On 6/5/08, Anthony <wikimail(a)inbox.org> wrote: ... If you're in a watchlist mindset, yes. This was my point about recentchanges though: since it's edit-based, not page-based, the only thing that affects the rate at which vandalism/etc can be dealt with is the project-wide edit rate. You don't need to know that a page exists to be able to check a diff via recentchanges, or via some automated tool that gets its information from recentchanges. You're only going to have trouble maintaining more articles if the very existence of those articles attracts more vandalism, but that view would completely ignore what we've seen through the whole history of the project, which is that productive contributors are attracted at a greater rate than vandals. If FritzpollBot articles attract more vandals, they'll simultaneously attract more contributors. -- Stephen Bain stephen.bain(a)gmail.com

It often strikes me that the subtext behind the urge to listify is the fairly-well-embedded belief that subjects only get an article to themselves if they "deserve" it. -Matt

You're missing the point. I think anyone can agree that Troy and Pompeii have much more global significance than X fishing village, Cambodia. Noble Story Steve Summit <scs(a)eskimo.com> wrote: bobolozo wrote: Hmm. By the same token, I guess we shouldn't have articles on [[Troy], [[Pompeii]], [[Neolithic Europe]], [[Xanadu]], [[Atlantis]], or [[Mars]]. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

David Gerard wrote: Television episodes... :) My initial reaction when learning about this plan was "oh no, not again" - I remember Rambot and how for a long while random page would give me one of its articles half the time I clicked on it. But after thinking for a moment longer I think this will be a good thing, overall. I'm a fan of completeness too and this will help establish that completeness is an important criterion for article inclusion. The only remaining problem I have with Rambot's articles is the formatting, which is archaic now and would require a rather clever bot to update without damaging edits that have been made to the original base. But I'm sure FritzpollBot will be using modern style guidelines for templates and citations when generating articles so that should be fine.

David Gerard wrote: This seems to be presented differently depending on which proposal you read. I'm finding stuff on the wiki about two million articles, which is virtually impossible if there is actually "considerable human review and involvement of the country WikiProjects" (especially since we don't even have WikiProjects on some countries). This particular proposal also seems to be heavily relying on a few global placename databases that: 1) have very minimal data (often just coordinates); and 2) have lots of errors, or at best ambiguity. Someone already found a village in Nigeria that likely doesn't even exist [1]. I would be much more comfortable with this being done on a country-by-country basis, with country-specific data sources that are both more complete and more reliable. In fact this is already being done---besides RamBot, there have been other country-specific projects to, for example, add articles on all the [[en:woreda]]s of Ethiopia, villages in Afghanistan, and so on. These sorts of projects go on all the time, rarely encounter much opposition, and produce higher-quality results. The attempt to uniformly treat the entire world en masse, based on questionable global data sources, is what's a bit more controversial. -Mark [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Gnaa%2C_Nigeri…

Delirium wrote: This point was brought up on one of the discussion pages. I believe the plan is to use the intersection of two or three nominally-independent databases.

On Sun, Jun 1, 2008 at 12:09 PM, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca> wrote: Modern for 2008, sure. Archaic in 2010? Probably.

On Sun, Jun 1, 2008 at 11:47 AM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: The answer to that question as posed is very large, but the practical answer is probably considerably smaller. Cities got grandfathered in before "notability" standards arose. For example, there's lots of public domain information on every 501(c)(3) charity in the United States. But would people accept bot-assisted article creation for every one of them? Other examples would be every company that does business in Florida, every publicly traded corporation, every person who died in the World Trade Center on September 11th, every domain name, every public router on the Internet, every Perl module in CPAN, etc.

2008/6/3 Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net>et>: However in many cases there will not be enough info to write a NPOV article. For example an article on say the Salisbury and Southampton Canal company that simply listed it's dates of founding and collapse would be somewhat misleading since it might lead the person to think that at some point the company was doing okay at least. Now in practice most publicly listed companies will have generated some news coverage so it is possible to write a NPOV article on them but a data dump from company house isn't the way to do it. -- geni

David Gerard wrote: From various data sources, mostly high quality, we could probably put together over a million new bot-generated articles on living species. However the current most common approach is to add them manually, attempting to flesh out the articles at least minimally as they're being added. This lets redlinks partly be used as a TODO list, instead of having to maintain a separate list of "articles that were added by a bot but still need to be expanded by real people". That could be done with a hidden category, though. Starting with just a few special-purposes data sources, FishBase includes 30,000 or so species of fish; the Blattodea database includes 4,560 cockroaches; Antbase includes 10k+ ants; Avibase includes 10k species and 22k subspecies; etc. It's not clear to me that importing of that sort would be an improvement over our current process, though. We're adding new species coverage at a fairly significant rate as it is, and the current loose arrangements are somewhat manageable. It's even less clear to me that automatically adding articles on politicians would be useful, unless you can get at least *some* minimal data on what they did, as opposed to just a listing of office/birth/death. The latter could be useful in creating a list article, like [[List of Governors of SomeState]], but it wouldn't be particularly useful in creating articles on the individual people. -Mark

On Mon, 2008-06-02 at 14:20 +0100, Magnus Manske wrote: Probably better than WikiSpecies, but that's not difficult at the moment. KTC -- Experience is a good school but the fees are high. - Heinrich Heine