[WikiEN-l] I want a bot too

Mon Sep 22 18:32:57 UTC 2003

The Cunctator wrote:

>The RamBot was a bad idea, and the IsraelBot is too.
>Wikipedia articles should be generated individually, not en masse.
>
>A semi-reasonable compromise would be to tag the auto-generated entries
>so that they didn't show up in the site statistics, etc. That is, the'd
>act as preformatted resources for editors who wanted to create an entry
>on a town, but wouldn't be considered real entries.
>
>--tc
>
Your argument makes no sense. There are certain things simply taken as 
facts that should be included in the Wikipedia. To wait for someone to 
enter all these things by hand would take forever. A bot can enter the 
data much more quickly and with a constantly consistent format for easy 
reading. Sure, someone should go back and look at all these bot entrys 
to add more information they might have from personal experience but to 
not let bots seed the 'pedia with factual stubs first would lessen 
Wikipedia's content.

As long as the information in a bot's stubs is factual, why not count it 
in the site statistics?