[Wikipedia-l] Re: 90000 articles

Wed Nov 13 08:37:50 UTC 2002

On Tuesday 12 November 2002 08:46 pm, wikipedia-l-request at wikipedia.org wrote:
> I guess I just take these things personally, but many of those geographical
> entries are more articles than those other 50k non-geographical articles.
>  They have more information.  People are just uncomfortable because they
> don't like the data because it does not interest them or because it was
> created in a mass quantity.  No one complains when others write articles
> that have two or three sentences.  In fact no one complained when I made
> these articles on a small scale, in fact I got a number of people who told
> me it was a great thing.  I think we need to stop separating the
> geographics articles from everything else. They are all articles and should
> be treated as such.  If you don't like them, add to them.
>     Ram-Man

I for one really like the Rambot articles /themselves/ but what I, and I 
suspect many others, feel uncomfortable about is that they were machine 
generated and /not/ individually created by a human being. 

One of the /major/ points of having an article count is to measure the 
relative progress of our community effort. Therefore it is not surprising 
that many people feel that their relative contribution to the project is 
somehow lessoned in value when a bot comes around and does in three weeks 
what took 2,000 + humans over a year to do. 

There is also concern that a critical media reporter might use the fact that 
"almost half" of our articles are machine-generated against us. If anything 
we should be as conservative as possible in our article counts to avoid 
giving our critics easy ways to dismiss our progress.

That is why I support the idea of letting the software not count the rambot 
articles as articles until at least one non-minor edit is made (this set-up 
relies on rambot only adding new content via minor edits in the future).  

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)