There are many articles whose apperance are bot generated but actually written with human hands.
I think I sometimes to have translated those articles - mainly on geographic locations - so even if the original were bot-generated, my translations ought not to be called so.
As for those articles ... in the beginning I was very skeptical. But as Nikola said people sometimes seek desperately for information which is rarely available. It is unlikely happening on major topics but rather minor topics. For example very small US towns or so.
Japanese Wikipedia provides articles on every - literally every - train stations. They even have some bus stop articles ('''XXX Bus Stop''' is a bus stop on XX High Way. yadda yadda). And they look like bot-generated. Personally I haven't seen them useful but - for fairness I have heard compliments about those articles exactly. A friend of mine said to me "Wikipedia is really useful. It tells me which station has how many platforms and how they each are connected. I check it whenever I need to make a business trip. It's nice to know where and how I should make a transit."
Bot generated contents per se are not evil. The recent problem is, as Ec said, if it overwhelms the existing community primarily and if such a project make any bad impact to the project as a whole, not this particular project but Wikimedia project as a whole.
On Dec 30, 2007 6:48 AM, Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.yu wrote:
On Saturday 29 December 2007 11:51, Daniel Arnold wrote:
I simply don't want to sit in the same boat with people that think a bot generated article is useful. I don't want to sit in the same boat with
How about people who know that a bot generated article is useful?
One of Serbian Wikipedians works in Telecom Serbia ( http://www.telekom.yu ). Occasionally, they have to work with a phone central in some unknown village. So, they search for the placename on Wikipedia so that they could see where that place is exactly and other basic info.
Yes, they could find the same information by querying the database on the website of the Institute of Statistics of Serbia, but using Wikipedia is more convenient for them.
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l