I'm a bot operator in Persian Wikipedia (~500K articles) and I'm directly or indirectly responsible for creating more than half of the articles in that Wiki using automated or semi-automated tools that I built. If our language used Latin alphabet, we definitely would be one of the five biggest wikis.
I'm telling this to emphasize I'm not against bot-creating articles in general but I agree this is not the way we build Wikipedia.
We create articles of Wikipedia for people to read. Even if your articles has a very low quality eventually someone will improve it [1] but articles that have reader. How many of these articles will be read by people? Honestly I think 100K out of the 1M was enough.
That's why we created articles by bot in broad topics in Persian Wikipedia (minor planets 16K, villages of Iran 70K, national heritages of Iran 20K, cities of the world ~20K, chemical compounds 10-20K) because 20K articles in same topic attracts less then half of reader comparing to combination of 10K in one topic and 10K in another topic.
[1]: IPs can't create article, we enabled it once, disaster. but they can edit articles (low-quality-bot-created articles) and it attracts to add something and after a while they become a regular editor. That's why Persian Wikipedia has one of the highest growth rate in number of users and active users. So bot-created articles can be useful but not this way. Best
On Mon, Jul 6, 2015 at 1:54 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, I would not say that the Encyclopaedia Britannica is NOT an encyclopaedia.
The objective of Wikipedia is EXACTLY that it is read. Not that it is edited.
You can argue all you like against bot generated articles but in the final analysis it is doing a much better job than not providing information. Arguably it is not needed to save them as articles because it is possible to generate them on the fly based on information from Wikidata and cache the results but that is EXACTLY the kind of technology that would bring missing information to any Wikipedia without distorting the number of articles for people who only care about editors and editing. It is EXACTLY the kind of technology I would welcome the WMF to explore. Thanks, GerardM
On 6 July 2015 at 11:09, Ilario Valdelli valdelli@gmail.com wrote:
https://war.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinaurog:ActiveUsers https://ceb.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espesyal:ActiveUsers
An encyclopedia in the first 10 places without a community is it an encyclopedia?
Is the community important to say that wikipedia is wikipedia? In this
case
these projects are demonstrating that Wikipedia can renounce to one of
its
pilaster.
In my opinion the impact of Waray Waray or of Cebuan is a demonstration that any "strange" language can have a big traffic if it is placed in the first places of the ranking because it will be best ranked in search engines.
But an impact is something that produces "effects" and "dissemination". I don't see impact because the bot has increased only one measure (page
view)
and nothing else.
If the impact must be produced with SEO, the parameters of evaluations
must
change.
It is different when a bot is running in an encyclopedia supported by a "mature" community, because the articles will be improved in quality and will generate more and more effects.
Regards
On Mon, Jul 6, 2015 at 10:55 AM, Gerard Meijssen < gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> wrote:
Hoi, How do you know that there is no impact ?
https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthlyCombined.htm
shows
clearly how much Cebuano has grown considerably in page views. The same
is
true for Waray Waray. Compare it to languages with a similar number of speakers. Please explain how this is not a real impact ! Thanks, GerardM
On 6 July 2015 at 10:20, Ilario Valdelli valdelli@gmail.com wrote:
This is an example about how to produce a "formal" impact without a
"real"
impact.
On Mon, Jul 6, 2015 at 7:31 AM, Salvador A salvador1983@gmail.com
wrote:
Hi!
I just I noticed that Cebuano and Waray-waray Wikipedia are inside
the
list
of the 10 Wikipedias with more articles.[1] It seems it happened
during
this weekend. Maybe in the case of Waray Wikipedia happened a
little
before. Somebody knows when did it was exactly? Did I miss a thread announcing this?
Waray-waray is now the 6th place and Cebuano has surpassed it.wiki
and
es.wiki and gained the place number 8, mainly due to Lsjbot
work.[2]
Definitely a milestone in Wikipedia and bots history.
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lsjbot
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