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

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
A few thousand articles is perfectly ok and will create no problems.. But
what will the boundaries be.. How do you restrict to which few thousand
articles? Once bots start creating articles it makes no difference to create
2.000 or 20.000 or 200.000 or 2.000.000 or 20.000.000 articles... The
difference on the impact on the Wikipedia community is however profound.

Without some clear ideas what we are talking about and what the criteria for
inclusion will be, I would advice the English Wikipedia to think really hard
if this is what they want and what they can absorb.
Thanks.
      GerardM

On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 7:04 PM, Andrew Su <asu at gnf.org> wrote:

>
>
> > -----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 5:23 AM
> > To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
> > Subject: [Junk released by User action] Re: [Foundation-l] Another
> look a
> > bot creation of articles
>
> [snip]
>
> > 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.
>
> Last point I wanted to bring up.  Yes, the few thousand "dedicated
> contributors" are very important to article growth.  But so are the
> hundreds of thousands (millions?) of infrequent contributors, the people
> who make individually small but collectively large contributions.  From
> our article (http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.0060175):
>
> "A recent study found that the number of contributions from new editors
> (less than 100 total edits) in total equals the number of contributions
> from the most established editors (greater than 10,000 edits) [7],
> illustrating the collective importance of the Long Tail."
>
> Of course, this doesn't argue that we should maintain a page on every
> chemical compound (which by definition is infinite).  But I think it
> suggests that bot article creation on the scale of a few thousand will
> not substantially increase maintenance burden or decrease quality.
>
> -andrew
>
>
>
> [7] Kittur A, Chi EH, Pendleton BA, Suh B, Mytkowicz T (2007) Power of
> the few vs. wisdom of the crowd, Wikipedia and the rise of the
> bourgeoisie. 25th Annual ACM Confernce on Human Factors in Computing
> Systems (CHI 2007). 28 April-3 May 2007; San Jose, California, United
> States.
>
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