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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

#21

Post by callesgg »

cjensen wrote: post #6
TomGullen wrote: post #2

So 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).

They contain loots of useful information

Here is an article from an earlier comment, https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutriana_repens

After reading that I know that Bouteloua repens is a form of grass. Who first identified it. Who gave it is current name and some other common names for the plant.

I think it is amazing. If someone has already filed in a the information it just seams like a waste of man hours to retype it to Wikipedia.

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

#22

Post by boomlinde »

dkhar wrote: 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…

> The only people who would need this information are botanists

I think that looking up plant species are exactly the kind of thing people would want to use an encyclopedia for.

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

#23

Post by thret »

Crito wrote: post #17
nmrm wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Exactly.

A stub also lowers the barrier of entry for new users wanting to add an obscure butterfly they've just tracked down.

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

#25

Post by shutupalready »

grizzles wrote: post #7

Why 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.

Unless there's some nuance that I'm missing, it sounds like that that is exactly what he's doing.

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

#27

Post by Ralith »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #20
dkhar wrote: 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?

That's a problem Wikipedia has in general; improvements to Wikipedia's botany coverage are not going to meaningfully change it one way or the another.

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

#28

Post by Vik1ng »

The only thing that pisses me off is that when I contribute I'm expected to write half a site in addition to such an infobox, otherwise a mod comes along and movees it into my sandbox.

That's the main reason I always stopped editing Wikipedia right away after I tryed.

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

#29

Post by gwern »

dkhar wrote: 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…

At least part of the problem is that he's generating what one might call 'info trash': he's taking highly structured information from databases, and turning it into natural-language prose, a data source of less value since it's less structured.

These prose versions are now going to steadily fall out of sync with the original databases, be much more prominent in Wikipedia and Google, diverge from each other, be harder to parse and perform any complex analysis on (a database is at least relatively comprehensible, but to parse his dumps you have to hope you can reverse-engineer it, no other bots or editors have modified it much, and that he didn't get clever with his format strings), etc. If at some point one wanted to change something about the presentation, it's no longer a matter of editing one template and now the user-friendly HTML view onto the database is automatically updated for all viewers, now one has to run a carefully-written bot on millions of articles (and since that is beyond semi-automated bots, you have to have special permission to run it).

It would have been better to work on merging databases or exporting them into a structured site, something like Freebase.

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

#30

Post by _delirium »

dangayle wrote: post #15

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.

If Wikipedia were the only website I'd agree, but I don't find it useful for Wikipedia to have stubs that are simple copies of other freely available sources (especially more authoritative ones), without some kind of synthesis or value-add. In the case of species, for example, I think there is little value in a Wikipedia stub that is just a reformatted copy of the ITIS entry (http://www.itis.gov/). If that's what I wanted, I'd just go to ITIS. When I see a Wikipedia result in a Google search result I typically expect it to be the basic taxonomic information one would find in ITIS plus something more. Otherwise it feels like some of that autogenerated SEO-style spam, which Google should penalize.

It also doesn't always really help in jumpstarting future improvements, if the structure doesn't align with the granularity that makes sense for an encyclopedia article. For example if there is a genus with three species, each of which is very similar and has very little distinctive written about it, the normal organization would be to write one article on the genus, with a short discussion of each subspecies in the main article, not broken out into three separate duplicative and near-empty articles. You'd only break out into separate articles on each species if there's enough to write about them that covering them as a group becomes unwieldy (this varies widely by species). If I were to hazard a prediction, it's that the English Wikipedia will as a result tend towards better organized species coverage than the Swedish Wikipedia, which will never get around to reorganizing these articles.

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