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(a)lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:foundation-l-
bounces(a)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(a)gnf.org> wrote:
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: foundation-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:foundation-l-
> > bounces(a)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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