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In Sweden, Sverker Johansson and His 'Bot' Have Created 2.7M Wikipedia Articles

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11–20 of 78 posts

Re: In Sweden, Sverker Johansson and His 'Bot' Have Created 2.7M Wikipedia Articles

#11
The harm in using bots in this way, I suppose, would be that correcting potential misinformation would be much more work intensive than adding the information in the first place.

It seems to me that the wikipedia model works because/when corrections are at most as costly as introducing the error.

Re: In Sweden, Sverker Johansson and His 'Bot' Have Created 2.7M Wikipedia Articles

#12
I used to like watching the article counts on this page: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias

But then the Dutch started using bots to inflate their article count... which was ok for a year or two but then other wikipedias started doing the same thing. Now I watch edit number of edits.

I don't care that bots are used, but article counts are completely useless in comparing wikipedias and it didn't used to be that way. Sure there were better measurements, but article counts were still pretty good.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Wikipedi...

Re: In Sweden, Sverker Johansson and His 'Bot' Have Created 2.7M Wikipedia Articles

#16
post #3

I'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…

So where is the deletionist bot to counter his spam?

Re: In Sweden, Sverker Johansson and His 'Bot' Have Created 2.7M Wikipedia Articles

#17
post #5
post #3

I'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…

> "and not really something you couldn't find in any number of other resources."

The same should be able to be said about everything on Wikipedia, since Wikipedia is not supposed to have original research and should have a source for everything.

The "Why?" would then be "Because it is better to search for [obscure butterfly] and find a short list of fact than to search for that butterfly and find nothing at all."

Re: In Sweden, Sverker Johansson and His 'Bot' Have Created 2.7M Wikipedia Articles

#18

I would rather have a bot written stub than nothing at all when I search in Wikipedia. Like it is mentioned in the story, some subjects are under represented while others are super saturated.

Exactly. If nothing else, those stub articles serve to give a (not complete, yet more accurate) index-able list of topics not yet adequately covered. Like a /* TODO */

Re: In Sweden, Sverker Johansson and His 'Bot' Have Created 2.7M Wikipedia Articles

#19

I used to like watching the article counts on this page: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias But then the Dutch started using bots to inflate their article count... which was ok for a year or two but then other wikipedias started doing the same thing. Now I watch edit number of edits. I don't care that bots are used, but article counts are completely useless in comparing wikipedias and it didn't used to…

    Wiki "size" = [Number of Articles] - [Number of Stub Articles]
Is a human-written stub article about minor characters from some fantasy book more valuable than a robot-written stub article about a type of grass? Is either article worth considering when trying to create some sort of metric for "wiki health"?

Is this metric actually useful for anything, other than as a curiosity? If I were multi-lingual and was trying to decide which wiki to use, I'd go with whichever wiki was in my primary language. If I did not find the information I was after, I would check the other wikis for the same article (nicely listed on the left portion of the screen).

Re: In Sweden, Sverker Johansson and His 'Bot' Have Created 2.7M Wikipedia Articles

#20
post #3

I'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'm normally a big fan of including any and all accurate information on Wikipedia. However, with this many articles, I'd be concerned about the ability of any human editors to actually notice malicious misinformation. If a random person edited one of those arcticles to change an obscure fact to an incorrect statement, would anyone notice?
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