[Wiktionary-l] 100K edits for RobotGMwikt

Sat Feb 18 11:43:26 UTC 2006

Hoi,
Today, the bot that I run has passed the 100.000 edit marks on the 
English Wiktionary. This is a result that is nice but still, I have very 
much mixed feelings about it. It is a good thing because having the 
interwiki links on Wiktionary promotes cooperation. The bad sentiment is 
because it is such a waste of resources. For Wiktionary it is not that 
bad; I just run the bot and it is process that is largely automatic. I 
do check every now and again, sometimes the software is updated and that 
does merit some checking.

For Wikipedia the situation is in my opinion more bleak. Many people 
spend a lot of effort in getting the interwiki links right. Where the 
Wiktionary process is a simple automatic process, the Wikipedia 
interwiki is a laborious affair. It is also a process where we know that 
a change because of some disambiguation is only done after some time. 
Many of the smaller wikipedia projects do not have people working on the 
interwiki links and it is here where the interwiki links would be most 
valuable.

It has been argued in the past that some innovation for the interwiki 
process is needed. There are some suggestions on Meta...

Oh yes, the Wiktionary process allows me to update concurrently on MANY 
wiktionaries. When you add up all the updates that RobotGMwikt has done, 
it could be something like 250.000+. Then again, I do not care that much 
about such statistics. It is just an indicator for the need for innovation.

Thanks,
    GerardM