I haven't looked at the bot article on those projects, but I'd like to
mention that a similar thing has happened in the case of the Volapük
Wikipedia. Years ago, its administrator S. Meira created over 100,000 bot
articles about towns and villages. This action was an effort to generate
some attention to this almost forgotten constructed language. And nobody
really cared, but then... *POP*, the Volapük Wikipedia found itself among
the 10 largest Wikipedias. At that point people from other projects
suddenly started to complain. There was a proposal to close down the entire
project, and the ultimate conclusion was that the project, including its
bot articles, could stay, but further bot articles were forbidden.
As an insider (sort of) of that project I can tell you that all those bot
articles are a bit of a pain, because it has become rather hard to find
articles that were written by real people. On the other hand, however, I
should point out that those bot articles are definitely not among the
worst. In fact, articles of the type 'X is a village in Y' or 'Z is an
American actor' are written not by bots, but by people who apparently don't
know the language but want to make those articles anyway. Same goes for
hundreds/thousands of articles about years, months, centuries etc.
Besides, let me point out two more things:
a) Extremely short articles ('X is a town in Y') have nothing to do with
bots, it is a general problem in many small projects. Look at the projects
in African languages: most of them are stuffed with this sort of oneliners.
b) Bot-generated articles are by no means the exclusive domain of Volapük
and these two Philippino projects. The Dutch WP has quite a few of them as
well, and the Swedish WP even more, AFAIK.
b) Ultimately it's up to the local community how they want to fill in their
Wikipedia. This whole who-has-more-articles thing may be childish, but
people from other projects making a fuss about it are IMO equally childish.
Cheers,
Jan
2018-02-01 18:07 GMT+01:00 MarcoAurelio <[email protected]>:
> I do not think the project meets the criteria for closing, but I think
> that the vast majority of the bot articles are unworthy and that the
> LangCom should suggest that you will not consider that kind of one line bot
> created articles as “content” in the future. This kind of
> *articlecountitis* is problematic when, to “catch” another project you
> just put a script to work to write millions of articles with a single line
> of text. Wikipedia and its sister projects should be to share knowledge,
> which should be more than to say that “Madrid is a city and the capital of
> Spain”. Granted, those kind of “articles” would qualify for speedy deletion
> in all projects I am active on. Regards, M.
>
> El El jue, 1 feb 2018 a las 7:33, Gerard Meijssen <
> [email protected]> escribió:
>
>> Hoi,
>> Not only should it be rejected, it should be rejected with prejudice. I
>> am not a fan of writing articles by bot not because they are bad but
>> because we can improve on the concept. The text can be created in the usual
>> manner and the resulting text can be cached, not saved. This means that
>> when there are changes to the data, they are picked up in the resulting
>> articles. It means that improvements on Wikidata do result in a better end
>> user experience.
>>
>> Given the blanket announcement by the outreach manager of the Wikimedia
>> Foundation that there will be no research in the Cebuano Wikipedia and the
>> effects the bot articles have, we have a situation that this attitude
>> prevents an avenue of providing information in the smaller languages. He
>> echoes what English Wikipedians opine and imho he does he disservice to
>> what we stand for, "sharing the sum of all knowledge".
>>
>> No, there is no good argument to close the Cebuano Wikipedia. There is
>> every argument to learn from the experience and do better. We should not
>> throw the baby with the wash water.
>> Thanks,
>> GerardM
>>
>> On 1 February 2018 at 07:08, Steven White <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>> See https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_
>>> projects/Closure_of_Cebuano_Wikipedia. This has been sitting open
>>> since October.
>>>
>>> In general, I think this should be rejected. First, it was created by
>>> someone who was mostly just creating requests (for both project creations
>>> and project closures) for sport. In and of itself, that gives this request
>>> poor provenance.
>>>
>>> That said, the request did garner support from a number of other editors
>>> on Meta. The basic reasoning is that while Cebuano Wikipedia has a very
>>> large number of pages (rivaling English Wikipedia), the vast majority of
>>> its content was created by bots, and much of that content--not all--ranges
>>> from useless to problematic. The community has not worked all that actively
>>> to fix things, and if anything they (and the community of the Waray
>>> Wikipedia) seem to be competing on who can have more pages. That's really
>>> not a good situation.
>>>
>>> But comments I've seen suggest the cebwiki community, as well as the
>>> PhilWiki
>>> Community <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/PhilWiki_Community>, are
>>> starting to get more interested. So given the general rules of project
>>> autonomy, it's probably not our place to step in. Therefore, I think the
>>> request should be rejected.
>>>
>>> I do wonder if people think we should make a _suggestion_ to the
>>> community that it stop the bots for a while.
>>>
>>> Steven
>>>
>>>
>>> Sent from Outlook <http://aka.ms/weboutlook>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>> [email protected]
>>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/langcom
>>>
>>>
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> --
> M. A.
>
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