[WikiEN-l] User:FritzpollBot creating millions of new

[Delirium]

David Gerard wrote:
> 2008/6/1 Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca>:
>   
>> But I'm sure
>> FritzpollBot will be using modern style guidelines for templates and
>> citations when generating articles so that should be fine.
>>     
>
>
> The considerable human review and involvement of country WikiProjects
> will help a great deal (and I suggest makes a nonsense of Nathan's
> assertion that these articles will be "untouched for a decade").
>   

This seems to be presented differently depending on which proposal you 
read. I'm finding stuff on the wiki about two million articles, which is 
virtually impossible if there is actually "considerable human review and 
involvement of the country WikiProjects" (especially since we don't even 
have WikiProjects on some countries).

This particular proposal also seems to be heavily relying on a few 
global placename databases that: 1) have very minimal data (often just 
coordinates); and 2) have lots of errors, or at best ambiguity. Someone 
already found a village in Nigeria that likely doesn't even exist [1].

I would be much more comfortable with this being done on a 
country-by-country basis, with country-specific data sources that are 
both more complete and more reliable. In fact this is already being 
done---besides RamBot, there have been other country-specific projects 
to, for example, add articles on all the [[en:woreda]]s of Ethiopia, 
villages in Afghanistan, and so on. These sorts of projects go on all 
the time, rarely encounter much opposition, and produce higher-quality 
results. The attempt to uniformly treat the entire world en masse, based 
on questionable global data sources, is what's a bit more controversial.

-Mark

[1] 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Gnaa%2C_Nigeria_(3rd_nomination)