[Wikipedia-l] 80,000

[The Cunctator]

On 10/26/02 12:28 PM, "koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com"
<koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com> wrote:

> Imran wrote:
>> To avoid giving a skewed view of the pedia we need some sort of
>> classification systems so that the RandomPage function first randomly
>> chooses a topic and then returns a random article from that topic.
> 
> Actually, RandomPage gives an accurate view of wikipedia: we have far more of
> Ram-Man's articles than anything else, so they turn up more than anything
> else.  A year ago we had far more Atlas Shrugged articles than anything else,
> so *those* would always turn up.  The solution?  Write more articles on other
> topics.
> 
That's one of the big problem with bots--the only reasonable way to keep up
with the small-town-bot entries is to use your own bots.

What are the pros and cons of the small-town bot?
+ Provides a good template for someone who wants to write an entry about a
small town (such as [[Newton, Massachusetts]])--actually, it's a good start
for any town, but entries for larger cities have mostly written
- Adds thousands of entries to Wikipedia that are unlikely to see a human
edit any time soon (in fact, we could probably extrapolate the nearly exact
rate at which they will get edited by seeing how many have been edited so
far)

Any graceful solution would provide the automatic functionality of the first
without the negative consequence of the second.

One example would be there to have a reasonably limited number of pages
listing all the possible towns (perhaps by state), with links. If someone
clicks on that link, they have the option of importing the small-town-bot
entry.

An equivalent solution is one that others have mentioned--tag the entries as
"bot entries" that are marked as ? pages (or at a minimum, ! pages), aren't
listed on default RecentChanges, don't appear on default RandomPage, but do
show up under searches-by-name and will appear if someone clicks on a link
to the entry.

When someone clicks on that link, they would get an entry clearly marked as
an automated addition, with the note that if they edit it, it will be
untagged.

In fact, it would make more sense for the tag not to be "bot" but
"imported". People who want to hand-import entries from public/GFDL sources
would use the same tag.