Hello Everyone, I am the first author of the paper that Denny has referred. Firstly, I want to thank Denny for asking me to join this list and know more about this discussion.
1. Regarding quality, we know that there are issues, and even in the conference, I have repeatedly told the audience that I am not satisfied with the quality of the content generated. However, the percentage of articles that were not removed when the paper was submitted was minimal. I have sent Denny a list of accounts that were used and it might have been possible that several articles created have been removed from those accounts within the last couple of months. I was not aware of the multiple account policy. 2. The area of Wikipedia article generation have been explored by others in the past. [http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P09-1024, http://wwwconference.org/proceedings/www2011/companion/p161.pdf] We were not aware of any rules regarding these sort of experiments. However, we do understand that such experiments can harm the general quality of this great encyclopedic resource, hence we did out analysis on bare minimum articles. In fact, we did our initial work on it back in 2014, and Wikimedia research even covered details about our paper here -- https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/02/02/wikimedia-research-newsletter-january-2015/#Bot_detects_theatre_play_scripts_on_the_web_and_writes_Wikipedia_articles_about_them If questions were raised at that point, we would surely not have done anything further on this, or rather do things offline without creating or adding any content on Wikipedia. I understand your point about imposing rules and I think it makes sense. However, during this research, we were not aware of any rules, hence continued our work. As I have told Denny, our purpose was to check whether we could create bare minimal articles which could be eventually improved by authors on Wikipedia, and also to see if they are totally removed. But, it was done with a few articles and we did not create anything beyond that point. Also, we did not do any manual modifications to the articles although we saw quality issues because it would void our analysis and claims. Thanks everyone for your time and the great work you are doing for the Wikipedia community. Regards, Sidd
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