[Foundation-l] Another look a bot creation of articles

[Chad]

On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 3:04 AM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hoi,
> You may want to consider the scale of things ... when you are talking
> chemicals, proteins a number like 240 million articles can be expected. With
> such numbers you have to wonder to what extend Wikipedia can cope.
> Thanks,
>      GerardM
>

I couldn't agree more. My major complaint to mass creation of articles by
bots is the simple problem of maintainability.

Assuming the English Wikipedia has (more or less) a few thousand
dedicated contributors (let's say 3500), that approximates to about
705 articles per person. Now, balloon that number up to 4 million articles,
and you now have 1142 articles per person.

Now granted, not every article is being updated and maintained on a daily
(or even weekly or monthly) basis. However, those articles _still_ need a
helpful eye kept on them. Vandalism and libel are still very much a part
of the projects, and without someone to keep an eye on things, it
degenerates rather quickly. Antivandalism bots can only help so much.

Personally, I don't have the time in the day to sit there and revert vandalism
on 240 million articles, nor do many others, I would gather.

-Chad