Richard Grevers wrote:
But aren't a third of those 1500-byte+ articles the machine-generated ones on US small towns?
You must stop feeling guilty for this. Those are good articles, a lot better than many initial Wikipedia articles. Just assume that any commercial encyclopedia contains machine-generated articles too.
The real difference is that they don't contain so detailed information on every little place-name. They are more focused on "relevant" topics (how ever you define that) and have left out the irrelevant.