Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com writes in Message-ID: 2008Jun02.0717.scs.0003@eskimo.com
Mark Nilrad wrote:
Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
bobolozo wrote:
A small fishing village in Cambodia, or a community of 100 people in Kenya, may well have no internet access at all, and if they have it, they would not likely be visiting the English wikipedia as they wouldn't likely speak English.
Hmm. By the same token, I guess we shouldn't have articles on [[Troy], [[Pompeii]], [[Neolithic Europe]], [[Xanadu]], [[Atlantis]], or [[Mars]].
You're missing the point. I think anyone can agree that Troy and Pompeii have much more global significance than X fishing village, Cambodia.
Um, no, you missed my point. Arguing about notability or "global significance" is one thing. But it makes no sense to bring up the question of whether the location of an article has Internet access, or how many people there might speak English.
Hallelujah! Notability is a set of crufty guideline and no more. "When you wonder what should or should not be in [wikipedia], ask yourself what a reader would expect to find under the same heading in an *encyclopedia*."
Now I haven't seen a print Britannica in years, but as I remember it there were one (or more) gazetteer volumes, page after page of places with coordinates. If all the bot does is add 2 million stubs, aka gazetteer entries, that's fine. I'd expect a non-paper encyclopedia to have a bloody huge list of places, inhabited or otherwise possibly of use to readers. If 10% of them are expanded into "proper" encyclopedia articles, that's fine too, we're 200K real articles to the better.
Yes, there are lots of questions to answer about data quality and implementation details, but as far as I can see, this is a win, win deal. Creating even gazetteer-quality geostubs from scratch is quite time consuming. Even translating place stubs from another language is not all that simple thanks to all the template discrepancies and the fact that administrative district X has a different name. Let a bot do the scut work. That's what they are for.
Angus