Absolutely agreed, the real numbers do make a difference. Ultimately though I'm not sure how hard and fast you could make the acceptance criteria. I think it would be a complex weighting between the number of articles, the content in each article, the size of the existing user community, the size of the community of new editors which you hope to attract, etc. Ultimately, I believe that weighting should be done by humans (rather than by comparing to some rigid rule set), and that it's up to each Wikipedia's governing bodies to decide what is right for them.
Speaking as someone who has gone through the bot approval process at the English Wikipedia, I was quite happy with how it turned out. We got some great suggestions from experienced users, we reached consensus on what the appropriate trial run and full run would look like, and ultimately I think everyone was satisfied with the process and the result. For context, here is the archived discussion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approval/Protei nBoxBot
-andrew
-----Original Message----- From: foundation-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:foundation-l- bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Gerard Meijssen Sent: Thursday, July 24, 2008 1:54 PM To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] [Junk released by User action] Re: Another looka bot creation of articles
Hoi, A few thousand articles is perfectly ok and will create no problems..
But
what will the boundaries be.. How do you restrict to which few
thousand
articles? Once bots start creating articles it makes no difference to create 2.000 or 20.000 or 200.000 or 2.000.000 or 20.000.000 articles... The difference on the impact on the Wikipedia community is however
profound.
Without some clear ideas what we are talking about and what the
criteria
for inclusion will be, I would advice the English Wikipedia to think
really
hard if this is what they want and what they can absorb. Thanks. GerardM
On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 7:04 PM, Andrew Su asu@gnf.org wrote:
-----Original Message----- From: foundation-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:foundation-l-
bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Chad Sent: Thursday, July 24, 2008 5:23 AM To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List Subject: [Junk released by User action] Re: [Foundation-l] Another
look a
bot creation of articles
[snip]
Assuming the English Wikipedia has (more or less) a few thousand dedicated contributors (let's say 3500), that approximates to
about
705 articles per person. Now, balloon that number up to 4 million articles, and you now have 1142 articles per person.
Last point I wanted to bring up. Yes, the few thousand "dedicated contributors" are very important to article growth. But so are the hundreds of thousands (millions?) of infrequent contributors, the
people
who make individually small but collectively large contributions.
From
our article (http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.0060175):
"A recent study found that the number of contributions from new
editors
(less than 100 total edits) in total equals the number of
contributions
from the most established editors (greater than 10,000 edits) [7], illustrating the collective importance of the Long Tail."
Of course, this doesn't argue that we should maintain a page on
every
chemical compound (which by definition is infinite). But I think it suggests that bot article creation on the scale of a few thousand
will
not substantially increase maintenance burden or decrease quality.
-andrew
[7] Kittur A, Chi EH, Pendleton BA, Suh B, Mytkowicz T (2007) Power
of
the few vs. wisdom of the crowd, Wikipedia and the rise of the bourgeoisie. 25th Annual ACM Confernce on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2007). 28 April-3 May 2007; San Jose, California,
United
States.
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