2008/6/1 Fayssal F. szvest@gmail.com:
One major concern... The next generation would believe that Botpedia started on 2001 and that Nupedia and Wikipedia lasted no more than a few days.
heh.
I think this bot-assisted programme of article creation is a Good Thing for topics where we do in fact have the data. Rambot's 2003 creation of 30,000 US placenames meant Wikipedia could claim *completeness* on the topic. (That's what the "encyclo-" prefix of "encyclopedia" means.) There is no reason not to bring similar completeness to our coverage of the rest of the world. It'll certainly help alleviate our systemic bias.
The issues I can see are editorial - the Rambot articles are data put in prose form that these days we'd do with a parameterised template, etc - but Fritzpoll seems quite aware of this and the programme appears to include considerable human review. Good.
The jump in article numbers will be noticed by the world. I've told the comcom list about this and have suggested a Wikimedia blog post on the topic.
The question that springs to mind is: what else can we get complete data on for bot-assisted article creation? Every state-level or higher politician in every country ever? What else?
- d.