On 12/30/07, David Gerard <dgerard(a)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.