In Sweden, Sverker Johansson and His 'Bot' Have Created 2.7M Wikipedia Articles
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Re: In Sweden, Sverker Johansson and His 'Bot' Have Created 2.7M Wikipedia Articles
#2So what are the arguments against what he is doing?
Seems fine to me, and sounds like it's likely to be adding value.
Re: In Sweden, Sverker Johansson and His 'Bot' Have Created 2.7M Wikipedia Articles
#3I'm not very in-tune with Wikipedia's culture (which, I've read, is very nuanced and rigid[1]), but I really don't see why this is a bad thing, given the information in the articles is accurate (and the article gives the impression that glitches are rare).
If nobody else was going to create an article about some species of butterfly, I don't see why adding that information would be harmful to Wikipedia. Does it make Wikipedia harder to read? Harder to search?
I don't think "it's not written by a human" is a valid argument for factual information, and I've never seen any evidence to suggest that it should be one.
EDIT: I found this bot's edit log! https://sv.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Logg/Lsjb...
Here are a few articles randomly picked out of the latest 1000:
https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urochloa_plantaginea
https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brachiaria_vittata
https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutriana_repens
https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andropogon_decipiens
After looking at these, I'm beginning to see why there is some backlash. There are literally thousands of articles here that read "X is a species of grass. It got its name from Y and is described in Z catalog." The only people who would need this information are botanists, and they already have their own specialized sources. I'm still not against bot-produced content, but I understand why some people oppose initiatives like this.
Re: In Sweden, Sverker Johansson and His 'Bot' Have Created 2.7M Wikipedia Articles
#4I'm not very in-tune with Wikipedia's culture (which, I've read, is very nuanced and rigid[1]), but I really don't see why this is a bad thing, given the information in the articles is accurate (and the article gives the impression that glitches are rare). If nobody else was going to create an article about some species of butterfly, I don't see why adding that information would be harmful to Wikipedia. Does it make…
Considering the fact that the rules and culture of Wikipedia seem to want people to write like bots, I don't see any issues with letting a real one do the writing for us!
Re: In Sweden, Sverker Johansson and His 'Bot' Have Created 2.7M Wikipedia Articles
#5I'm not very in-tune with Wikipedia's culture (which, I've read, is very nuanced and rigid[1]), but I really don't see why this is a bad thing, given the information in the articles is accurate (and the article gives the impression that glitches are rare). If nobody else was going to create an article about some species of butterfly, I don't see why adding that information would be harmful to Wikipedia. Does it make…
Reading the article, I think some of it is more of a "why?" than a "why not?", since the articles are factually correct but are mostly just lists of facts and not really something you couldn't find in any number of other resources.
For people who do serious article writing, I imagine this might be considered as a "cheapening" their work. For instance, I imagine some editors also resent the notion that encyclopedia editing is somehow reducible to plugging facts into the right templates. Of course the bot's authors don't really believe they are creating articles as high-quality as good human-edited entries, but the emotional reaction on the part of other editors is at least something I can comprehend.
I'm not really in tune with Wikipedia, so this is mostly conjecture.
edit: reverted edit, added first sentence of 2nd paragraph.
Re: In Sweden, Sverker Johansson and His 'Bot' Have Created 2.7M Wikipedia Articles
#6So what are the arguments against what he is doing? Seems fine to me, and sounds like it's likely to be adding value.
The argument against would be that 2.7M articles containing no useful content is not helpful. (Assuming, which I do, that the articles do not contain useful content).
Re: In Sweden, Sverker Johansson and His 'Bot' Have Created 2.7M Wikipedia Articles
#7Why doesn't this guy just package up the database, and autogenerate the page if the page is blank. That would have more utility than mixing human and bot generated articles.
Re: In Sweden, Sverker Johansson and His 'Bot' Have Created 2.7M Wikipedia Articles
#8I'm not very in-tune with Wikipedia's culture (which, I've read, is very nuanced and rigid[1]), but I really don't see why this is a bad thing, given the information in the articles is accurate (and the article gives the impression that glitches are rare). If nobody else was going to create an article about some species of butterfly, I don't see why adding that information would be harmful to Wikipedia. Does it make…
I think the problem is that the entries are very low-quality and are being produced in such great quantities that it will be hard for anyone to turn them into passable articles.
The purpose of Wikipedia is not to be a collection of all the factual information it gather. You or I might wish for it to be one, but that isn't what its creators mean for it to be. Each individual article is expected to meet Wikipedia's guidelines for relevance and to have some minimal level of quality. If it isn't possible to write a good, encyclopedic article on a topic, Wikipedia's stance is generally that it should be deleted (or, if the article is just overly specific and the information is relevant to a broader topic, the article might be incorporated into a section in a more general article).
Re: In Sweden, Sverker Johansson and His 'Bot' Have Created 2.7M Wikipedia Articles
#9This is awesome.
I wonder if he would considering adding some element of readability algorithms to it.
Re: In Sweden, Sverker Johansson and His 'Bot' Have Created 2.7M Wikipedia Articles
#10I'm not very in-tune with Wikipedia's culture (which, I've read, is very nuanced and rigid[1]), but I really don't see why this is a bad thing, given the information in the articles is accurate (and the article gives the impression that glitches are rare). If nobody else was going to create an article about some species of butterfly, I don't see why adding that information would be harmful to Wikipedia. Does it make…
Reading the article, I think some of it is more of a "why?" than a "why not?", since the articles are factually correct but are mostly just lists of facts and not really something you couldn't find in any number of other resources. For people who do serious article writing, I imagine this might be considered as a "cheapening" their work. For instance, I imagine some editors also resent the notion that encyclopedia ed…
> ...Reading the article, I think some of it is more of a "why?" than a "why not?", since the articles are factually correct but are mostly just lists of facts and not really something you couldn't find in any number of other resources.
The argument I'd make for "why?" is that Wikipedia is more accessible and more reliably available than most other resources. I mean, if the government of the Philippines had a web-based, up-to-date list of towns with some basic information, it might make sense to offload the effort of maintaining that information to them. As it stands, though, not even the US has such a directory -- so Wikipedia picks up the slack (or at least it does for towns in the US).