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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

#31

Post by vacri »

boomlinde wrote: post #22
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.

These are (almost) one-sentence articles. They're not appropriate for an encyclopaedia. If anything, they should be in a 'list' article format.

If you want these kind of one-sentence descriptors, they would be better served in a specialist publication.

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

#32

Post by baddox »

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, and they already have their own specialized sources.

So, that's a nice benefit for botanists (particularly amateur or student botanists), with only a very minor cost imposed on everyone else (namely, the slight namespace pollution, but that's very unlikely to manifest itself). Sounds alright to me.

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

#33

Post by baddox »

vacri wrote: post #31
boomlinde wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

These are (almost) one-sentence articles. They're not appropriate for an encyclopaedia. If anything, they should be in a 'list' article format. If you want these kind of one-sentence descriptors, they would be better served in a specialist publication.

If one-sentence articles are considered a problem, that seems like a reasonable choice for Wikipedia to make, but it would apply to human-written and bot-written articles.

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

#34

Post by baddox »

gwern wrote: post #29
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…

Sometimes I appreciate what you call "info trash." For example, I assume there is a bot that turns census data into articles for every incorporated community in the US, like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency,_Missouri.

I still think the article is useful as is, with just the map, data sheet, and demographics, and of course many incorporations have additional human-composed information added.

I could imagine some more structured data source, where the main article redirects to a table and scrolls to the correct spot. I would be fine with that, but as far as I know that concept doesn't exist on Wikipedia.

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

#35

Post by baddox »

_delirium wrote: post #30
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…

> 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.

The value-add is that I know about Wikipedia, but not about whatever more authoritative botanical site you're mentioning.

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

#36

Post by eru »

shutupalready wrote: post #26

Why is he doing this in Swedish and two versions of Filipino? He apparently speaks English, so I assume he could adapt his code to do English entries as well.

I guess he only has a finite amount of time and energy. Converting the bot might be the easiest part, but then, you also need to convince the English 'pedians.

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

#37

Post by [deleted] »

baddox wrote: post #35
_delirium wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. The value-add is that I know about Wikipedia, but not about whatever more authoritative botanical site you're mentioning.

[deleted]

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

#38

Post by _delirium »

baddox wrote: post #34
gwern wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sometimes I appreciate what you call "info trash." For example, I assume there is a bot that turns census data into articles for every incorporated community in the US, like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency,_Missouri . I still think the article is useful as is, with just the map, data sheet, and demographics, and of course many incorporations have additional human-composed information added. I could imagine…

> I could imagine some more structured data source, where the main article redirects to a table and scrolls to the correct spot. I would be fine with that, but as far as I know that concept doesn't exist on Wikipedia.

The structured data source now exists, but how to present its data is still being worked out. You can add information to it now, since the goal is to collect a bunch of structured information and then incrementally figure out how to display it, either on its own or integrated into Wikipedia articles (bot additions here are also very welcome): https://www.wikidata.org

I believe there's going to be some offloading of some structured Wikipedia information so it pulls from Wikidata in the future, instead of being maintained "manually" in articles. For example the geotags that are currently buried in Wikipedia articles' markup will probably be centralized to Wikidata soonish and just pulled from there to display. And infoboxes may be auto-populated from the Wikidata information as well. Sending people to auto-generated stub articles when a "real" article is missing is an interesting idea that might happen longer-term.

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

#39

Post by tokai »

baddox wrote: post #35
_delirium wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. The value-add is that I know about Wikipedia, but not about whatever more authoritative botanical site you're mentioning.

That is why we search. With the nearly empty wikipedia page in place, you might never be driven to find the better source.

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

#40

Post by drivingmenuts »

Quote: His ability to document relatively obscure facts helps him combat one of the biggest problems he sees in the Wikipedia community. Many entries, he argues, are made by white male "nerds."

Quote: "It saddens me that some don't think of Lsjbot as a worthy author," he said. "I am a person; I am the one who created the bot. Without my work, all these articles would never have existed."

And just how is he, a white male nerd, combatting the problem?

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