tarquin <tarquin(a)planetunreal.com> writes: Would it be possible to move the fantastic-waste-of-space that is Ram-Man's latest datadump to gazetteer.wikipedia.com, or somesuch, so they don't clutter up the *worthwhile* *encyclopedic* entries? -- Gareth Owen "Wikipedia does rock. By the count on the "brilliant prose" page, there are 14 not-bad articles so far" -- Larry Sanger (12 Jan 2001)

The Cunctator <cunctator(a)kband.com> writes: RandomPages RecentChanges What is the point of well done bad articles? -- Gareth Owen "Wikipedia does rock. By the count on the "brilliant prose" page, there are 14 not-bad articles so far" -- Larry Sanger (12 Jan 2001)

On 26-10-2002, Imran Ghory wrote thusly : There was some discussion about classification, metadata and solutions to tackle the growing volume of information. Then there were 10,000-15,000 articles. It was either rebuked or the importance was minimized. To classify was thought unwiki and impracticable ("who will classify, according to what criteria, what about multiple categories and wrongly assigned articles who would correct them"). Manning was in favour and I think it is thanks to him we have Wikiprojects. Long ago I created metadata subpages for a few articles as an excercise in this direction but probably they got votes for deletion as a search engine whoring. Have you worked out some solutions ? How do you think it could be accomplished ? Regards, Kpjas.

Gareth Owen wrote: An idea: Can Randompage weight the articles that it picks by their length? This will make *any* stub less likely to be chosen, arguably without giving a distorted picture of what Wikipedia is like. -- Toby

Brion VIBBER wrote: I knew that they weren't short, but I was hoping that they weren't *long*. I guess that they are. (I assume that by "average" you mean <arithmetic mean>, then?) Weighting by size could never cut out articles larger than the mean, so the conclusion is not that most of Wikipedia would be cut out but instead that the Ram-bot entries would not be cut out. In light of other responses, there seem to be two purposes to Randompage. One is to give visitors an idea of what Wikipedia is like, and if Ram-bot entries are both among the most common and most substantial of Wikipedia articles, that it's only fair that they show up often. But another is to give contributors ideas for new things to work on, and Ram-bot entries are generally useless for this purpose. Perhaps we need 2 versions of Randompage? (I should not really talk about it, since I rarely use Randompage anyway.) -- Toby

At 08:50 PM 10/26/02 -0700, Toby wrote: That would be a good option, but shouldn't be the default--one of the ways I use "random page" is to find things to improve and edit, and stubs definitely qualify there. -- Vicki Rosenzweig vr(a)redbird.org http://www.redbird.org

Paul Ebermann wrote: In itself, no it's not. I did a random page search myself just now and here are my results. I didn't happen to get any year pages this time around, but six out of my twenty clicks took me to a rambot town and the last four of those were in a row directly after each other. One year entry, or one town, or one country demographics entry (etc) by itself isn't a problem, but when you click again and get another one, and again etc, it might make people think that that's all we have in the wikipedia. I could see it dissuading people from trying to use the wikipedia, because they might think that their kind of information wasn't wanted or needed, or that the wikipedia just doesn't have what they're looking for when it probably does. MY RESULTS 1) Whippet - tiny stub 2) Master station - straightforward definition, drawn from Federal Standard 1037C 3) Topological group - lengthy mathematical article 4) Lexington, Missouri - Rambot entry 5) Worcester Cathedral - tiny stub 6) F-14 Tomcat - lengthy article, with written information and a long list of stats 7) Triboluminescence - stub, basically a definition 8) Antony and Cleopatra - stub on the Shakespeare play 9) Stotts City, Missouri - Rambot entry 10) History of Swaziland - CIA factbook entry, very stubbish 11) Arecales - microstub (family listing) 12) Ripe - disambiguation page, no actual info 13) Der er et yndigt land - (Danish national anthem) lyrics and English translation 14) Cow tipping - short article on an urban legend 15) Hub - definition 16) Feyenoord Rotterdam - short article on the Dutch football team 17) Cleveland, Illinois - rambot entry 18) Marion Heights, Pennsylvania - rambot entry 19) Spring Valley, Ohio - rambot entry 20) New Richmond, Wisconsin - rambot AGAIN -- Karen AKA Kajikit To err is human... to really foul things up add kitten and stir. Come and visit my part of the web: Kajikit's Corner: http://Kajikit.netfirms.com/ Aussie Support Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AussieSupport Allergyfree Eating Recipe Swap: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Allergyfree_Eating Ample Aussies Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ampleaussies/

What space are they wasting? What things would be in that space if Ram-Man's articles weren't there? Why does it bother you so much? Zoe Gareth Owen &lt;wiki(a)gwowen.freeserve.co.uk&gt; wrote:tarquin writes: Would it be possible to move the fantastic-waste-of-space that is Ram-Man's latest datadump to gazetteer.wikipedia.com, or somesuch, so they don't clutter up the *worthwhile* *encyclopedic* entries? -- Gareth Owen "Wikipedia does rock. By the count on the "brilliant prose" page, there are 14 not-bad articles so far" -- Larry Sanger (12 Jan 2001) [Wikipedia-l] To manage your subscription to this list, please go here: http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Y! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your web site

Oh, good. Can we add the names of all of the Iraqi citizens who are dying because of Saddam's refusal to pass around internationally-provided food and medicine to anyone other than his elites? Zoe tarquin &lt;tarquin(a)planetunreal.com&gt; wrote: Jeroen Heijmans wrote: I agree. I've been pondering this issue. Maybe a new "Memorial Wiki", not just for 9/11 for future victims of war & terrorism too. (remember to add the civilian casualties should Dubya bomb Iraq) [Wikipedia-l] To manage your subscription to this list, please go here: http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Y! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your web site

Maybe I have not understood *at all* what a stub was ??? I thought it was a very short article, in bad need of being expanded ??? Are you not confusing *stub* with *not-reviewed articles* here ? If such a decision is taken, we'll have to set up a new page "articles to be absolutely reviewed not to be confused with stubs". I have a handful of articles which I believe have never been edited by anybody. I certainly would feel very insulted if they were listed as stubs. There is a need to catch automatically generated articles, but not that way. __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Y! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your web site http://webhosting.yahoo.com/