--- The Cunctator cunctator@kband.com wrote:
Your argument, sir, makes as much sense as mine. The need for Wikipedia seeding is highly debatable; and the advisability of doing it even more debatable, as the more that bots are used, the less likely it is that someone will go back and look at all those bot entries.
There should be a balance between encyclopedia size and contributor participation--the best way to ensure that is to not auto-generate entries.
My suggestion was to let bot-seeding happen, but for those seeds to remain "hidden" until someone goes and looks for the information. Take, for example, [[Leominster, Massachusetts]].
My proposal would be as follows:
- If you went to [[Johnny Appleseed]], for example,
the link to Leominster would be in new-page or stub-link format (? or !), not a standard link, until someone actually made a change other than the Rambot entry. 2. If you click to that link, you see the Rambot content. 3. If you search for Leominster, the Rambot entry would show up in the listing (perhaps tagged). 4. The page wouldn't count in the statistics until someone's made at least one edit to the entry.
That way you get the benefit of the content-seeding without the distortion of the size or intent of Wikipedia, even if hundreds of thousands of such seedings are done.
There's also the side argument that all Rambot did was take information that should be in tables and graphs and put it into paragraph form to make it seem like Wikipedia style. It probably sould have done better just to supply the tables and graphs for eventual inclusion in real entries about the towns.
Sounds like a good idea, but I think that should be for all articles that have only been edited by one person. We shouldn't single out rambot.
The other thing ist that this (your idea or my variant, either one) would make the article count jump down by at least 25,000. This is very significant. LDan
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