[Wikipedia-l] Easton's Bible Dictionary

[Neil Harris]

Toby Bartels wrote:

>Neil Harris wrote in part:
>  
>
>>How about, as was suggested before by someone else, a new namespace: 
>>something like "PDresource:" that can be used by auto-uploaders to get 
>>PD info into a Wikified format without polluting the main namespace, but 
>>can then be used as source material for the 'pedia by human contributors.
>>    
>>
>
>Something like this would be a good idea.
>
>There's a difference between a direct upload
>and the ordinary draft status of most of Wikipedia,
>where at least the contributor thinks that the article is good,
>at least to the extent that it's been written
>(and hopefully leaves notes about the gaps).
>
>  
>
If we had a "review score" system, then we could say that
* a page generated by a human edit starts with  a review score of 1: 
that is to say, at least one human being (the original poster) thought 
that it was good.
* a page generated by a bot starts with a review score of 0, since no 
human being has reviewed it

More than this, we could auto-detect bots by setting a minimum 
inter-edit threshold of say 10 seconds, and mark all rapid sequences of 
edits by a user, logged-on or not, as bot-generated.

Then, humans browsing the Wikipedia would normally operate at a review 
cutoff level of 1: seeing all human-contributed pages, and no 
bot-contributed pages. This would also mean that casual visitors would 
not edit those pages, as they would never see them: if they created a 
page with the same title as a bot-created one, they would supersede it, 
and never know: this follows the principle that human contributions 
would take precedence over mechanical article creation. Only logged-in 
users who deliberately wanted to would set their review cutoff to 0, and 
therefore be able to see and edit bot-contributed pages.

The scheme could be extended: the review score could be bumped by 
counting page views and edits, and applying weighted or thresholded 
increments.

Neil