On 12/30/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
The problem is not bot-generated articles. The problem is that one user on the Volapuk Wikipedia, by his own admission, deliberately created tens of thousands of articles by bot purely to raise Volapuk's listing on the front page of www.wikipedia.org. He was not doing this to write a useful Wikipedia in any way, but (again by his own admission) to publicise the Volapuk constructed language.
He acted in bad faith; the question is then how to deal with this act of bad faith and not allow it to be rewarded.
David, participating in any competition is a matter of vanity. And www.wikipedia.org supports that vanity. And while expressing of vanity is constructive, I don't have anything against it -- knowing that it is a socially supported behavior.