[Foundation-l] [Junk released by User action] Re: Another look a bot creation of articles

[Andrew Su]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: foundation-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:foundation-l-
> bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Chad
> Sent: Thursday, July 24, 2008 6:30 AM
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
> Subject: [Junk released by User action] Re: [Foundation-l] Another
look a
> bot creation of articles

[snip]

> I never said to stop the number of articles if our userbase doesn't
> increase. The idea is that the userbase (hopefully) increases 
> proportionally to the number of articles. By normal human creation,
this
> more or less happens. When you add a bunch of artificially created 
> articles, that fails to happen.

Chad, I'd be interested in hearing more about this.  Has there been a
systematic study of this?  If this is a conjecture, then I'd suggest
that it's possible that if you create really *useful* stubs, then that
will actually increase your user base.  The way I think of it, there are
thousands of active biologists who had no interest in Wikipedia before
because there wasn't anything there that they were passionate about
contributing to.  Now there is, and we hope that's reason for them to
become contributors.  Of course, that's conjecture too, but we can
(will) do a retrospective analysis later to try to quantify that effect.
 
> And to say that vandalism doesn't happen on low-viewed articles is
> patently wrong.
> While "intense maintenance" may be a bit extreme, they at _least_ need
> someone
> to look over them once and awhile to make sure that someone hasn't
screwed
> with
> it.

As of now, I manage to maintain an eye on all these articles without too
much difficulty.  For example, this link makes it quite simple:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:RecentChangesLinked&hi
deminor=0&target=Template%3AGNF+Protein+box&showlinkedto=1

Right now, there's a few dozen edits a day, and most of them by
established contributors I've come to recognize.  It's actually quite
easy to do a spot-check of new/anonymous edits.  Of course, I hope that
the number edits quickly grows beyond what I as one person can
"oversee".  In that case though, it will likely mean that the WP:MCB
community has also grown, and there will effectively be a "Gene Wiki new
page patrol" that can share this responsibility.

-andrew