[Foundation-l] Another looka bot creation of articles

[Andrew Su]

Absolutely agreed, the real numbers do make a difference.  Ultimately
though I'm not sure how hard and fast you could make the acceptance
criteria.  I think it would be a complex weighting between the number of
articles, the content in each article, the size of the existing user
community, the size of the community of new editors which you hope to
attract, etc.  Ultimately, I believe that weighting should be done by
humans (rather than by comparing to some rigid rule set), and that it's
up to each Wikipedia's governing bodies to decide what is right for
them.

Speaking as someone who has gone through the bot approval process at the
English Wikipedia, I was quite happy with how it turned out.  We got
some great suggestions from experienced users, we reached consensus on
what the appropriate trial run and full run would look like, and
ultimately I think everyone was satisfied with the process and the
result.  For context, here is the archived discussion:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approval/Protei
nBoxBot

-andrew
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: foundation-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:foundation-l-
> bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Gerard Meijssen
> Sent: Thursday, July 24, 2008 1:54 PM
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] [Junk released by User action] Re: Another
> looka bot creation of articles
> 
> 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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