Andre Engels wrote:
My opinion is that automatic uploading of such texts is
a bad thing, but for
slightly different reasons. My problem is that automatic uploading brings 'the
good, the bad and the ugly'. Some EBD articles form a good basis for a
Wikipedia article, others are of little use (I don't think we want the EBD
entry on Egypt, nor do we want an article from a 1911 encyclopedia on
Ljubljana, stating that it is a city in the Austria-Hungarian empire). Someone
who wants to upload material from a source like the EBD should him/herself
make the selection as to which entries are interesting for Wikipedia, not
brush that responsibility onto the community after the fact or upload
everything just because it is there.
Andre Engels
[Wikipedia-l]
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Ok, there seems to be a consensus in the most recent comments that this
is a now a bad thing, so I've stopped uploading the articles. I think
there are some interesting lessons to be learned.
* auto-uploading is a mixed blessing
* some of the articles were rather interesting
* some were dross
* automatic content filtering was only partially successful
* uploading rapidly is bad: Wikipedia's NPOV processes can only
assimilate a certain rate of addition of added content
* it seems to have stimulated a fair bit of editing of non-uploaded
articles: creating a sort of "theme day" for Wikipedia
* auto-Wikification is more difficult than it at first seems
This was a pilot for possible larger projects. Given the response, I
think I need to take a different approach: I didn't anticipate the load
on the community's goodwill.
The PD NIH disease factsheets are the ideal target for this sort of
work: Easton's was a sort of dry run for the idea.
How about, as was suggested before by someone else, a new namespace:
something like "PDresource:" that can be used by auto-uploaders to get
PD info into a Wikified format without polluting the main namespace, but
can then be used as source material for the 'pedia by human contributors.
That way, the effort can be split: the natural thing to do with
auto-uploading _is_ massive data-dumps at a time, and this would benefit
the human contributors by getting a lot of text into a suitable format,
ready for human selection.
Neil