Toby Bartels wrote:

It's unreasonable for people to copy in these old texts, include a warning that the material may be biased or out of date, and then expect somebody watching Recentchanges to fix them. If I create or edit an entry, then *I* am responsible for checking that the material is neutral and accurate. This isn't asking for perfection, a standard that I don't meet anyway, but for a reasonable human judgement that the material is good. Mass copying, whether by a script or not, whether filtered or not, doesn't provide this.

I agree completely. We already have over 35,000 articles and we have done this in year an a half - if anything we should be concentrating on quality not quantity at this point. One thing we have is a lot of is articles. Another thing we have is a lot of are stubs that need to be fixed. Yet another thing we have gobs of is unimproved 1911 and other public domain text that also needs to be fixed. Need we pile on a lot more at this point with automatic uploads? This made perfect sense a year ago when there were many major chunks of human knowledge missing from the 'pedia but is no longer the case (at least in terms of what is being uploaded -- we already have lots of that type of stuff).

If we want to use the EBD to write Biblically themed articles, then that's great, and I don't expect Neil to do it all himself, but we should set up a Bible article writing group to do it, with human editing for each entry before it appears (in the [[:]] namespace).

It sounds like the EBD would be an excellent resource for a themed WikiProject -- participants would rewrite, NPOVize, improve and expand the EBD text. Remember part of what we are doing here is community building -- bots don't make for very good community members. Humans should be the ones that review, fix and expand content before uploading it.

But then I'm not sure how we could prevent bots from doing what they do without also preventing humans who happen to use text browsers to edit the pedia (banning bots in general would be nice in the vandal prevention dept. though). Perhaps all we could do is have a stated policy on this.

--mav

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