Hoi, Not only should it be rejected, it should be rejected with prejudice. I am not a fan of writing articles by bot not because they are bad but because we can improve on the concept. The text can be created in the usual manner and the resulting text can be cached, not saved. This means that when there are changes to the data, they are picked up in the resulting articles. It means that improvements on Wikidata do result in a better end user experience.
Given the blanket announcement by the outreach manager of the Wikimedia Foundation that there will be no research in the Cebuano Wikipedia and the effects the bot articles have, we have a situation that this attitude prevents an avenue of providing information in the smaller languages. He echoes what English Wikipedians opine and imho he does he disservice to what we stand for, "sharing the sum of all knowledge".
No, there is no good argument to close the Cebuano Wikipedia. There is every argument to learn from the experience and do better. We should not throw the baby with the wash water. Thanks, GerardM
On 1 February 2018 at 07:08, Steven White koala19890@hotmail.com wrote:
See https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_ projects/Closure_of_Cebuano_Wikipedia. This has been sitting open since October.
In general, I think this should be rejected. First, it was created by someone who was mostly just creating requests (for both project creations and project closures) for sport. In and of itself, that gives this request poor provenance.
That said, the request did garner support from a number of other editors on Meta. The basic reasoning is that while Cebuano Wikipedia has a very large number of pages (rivaling English Wikipedia), the vast majority of its content was created by bots, and much of that content--not all--ranges from useless to problematic. The community has not worked all that actively to fix things, and if anything they (and the community of the Waray Wikipedia) seem to be competing on who can have more pages. That's really not a good situation.
But comments I've seen suggest the cebwiki community, as well as the PhilWiki Community https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/PhilWiki_Community, are starting to get more interested. So given the general rules of project autonomy, it's probably not our place to step in. Therefore, I think the request should be rejected.
I do wonder if people think we should make a _suggestion_ to the community that it stop the bots for a while.
Steven
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