2008/6/1 Delirium delirium@hackish.org:
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).
What some people on the Village Pump are going nonlinear about has little to no relation to any actual plans.
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.
The most sensible actual discussion I can find is on [[User talk:Fritzpoll]]. Fritzpoll appears to be proceeding with all due caution, and at this stage will be preparing only lists of possible articles for creation, not actually creating them.
- d.