Birgitte SB wrote:
--- Daniel Arnold arnomane@gmx.de wrote:
Am Mittwoch, 26. Dezember 2007 22:21:10 schrieb Luiz Augusto:
Soundlessly, some folks are missing what are exactly Wikimedia versus local communities issue
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_projects/Radical_clean
up_of_Volapük_Wikipedia
Once more:
- This is not about deleting vo.wikipedia
- This is not about denying the right of a Volapük
Wikipedia
This is *only* about the way choosen to create the Volapük Wikipedia. This is about changing this unhealthy way that severely harms all other Wikipedias (not only wih Interwiki spam to useless bot articles). This is about a bad habbit of edit cheating others have done prior. Volapük Wikipedia simply went to far down this road to perdition. No other Wikipedia contains nearly 100% bot generated content.
The protest here is that you should have no say in the way chosen to create the Volapük Wikipedia. If Volapük Wikipedia is valid community, then they are free to create their project by any method that works for them. If it is not a valid community, then the WMF should close the project. This is a bright line. There is no basis for outsiders to dictate how a local community goes about it's work excepting for violations of the foundation principles ("free as in freedom", Neutral Point of View, "anyone can edit"). This new kind of micromanagment you have proposed has nothing to do with a foundation principle as far as I can tell. I personally find your proposal out of line and if it succeeds, I agree that it will be "A dangerous precedent".
If the issue is about bot generated articles the principle is still that any "person" can edit, not that any "thing" can edit. Persons can apply human judgement; bots can't. In a small community, when someone introduces a bot to massively generate articles it can completely overwhelm that community. If a member of the community objects that the bot is slanting those articles with a particular point of view, there is nobody with whom the articles can be discussed. The bot's manager may not even be familiar with the detailed contents, so he is in no position to defend it. Even with a sound and uncontroversial deletion policy the human editors can't keep up. It's a bit like a casino insisting that any $10,000 jackpot on the nickel slots must be paid out in nickels.
Ec