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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