[WikiEN-l] User:FritzpollBot creating millions of new articles

[Gwern Branwen]

On 2008.06.01 01:36:44 -0700, bobolozo <bobolozo at yahoo.com> scribbled 0.8K characters:
> See
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28proposals%29#User:FritzpollBot_creating_millions_of_new_articles
>
> A bot has been approved to create articles on every
> place in the world which doesn't have an article yet,
> predicted to be about 2 million new stub articles.
>
> There is some question as to whether or not this is a
> good idea, as it would double our number of articles
> within a few months, perhaps mess up Special:Random,
> and most of the new articles would forever be tiny
> stubs.  There are suggestions that perhaps the bot
> could be limited to towns of a certain population
> size, or perhaps the tiny villages could be combined
> into lists instead of each having its own article.
>
> I'm not arguing for or against this, just bringing it
> up here.  If there are any concerns, speak now before
> the bot begins.

We did fine absorbing the articles created by Rambot (which was at least a doubling in articles, IIRC, which is more than proposed here, as we currently have 2.3 million articles); I sometimes go Special:Random spelunking, and all the obviously Rambot-sourced article seem to have been modified and updated since.

--
gwern
lynch Astra wetsu imagery shelter SEIDM bombs Sayeret SADCC Bellcore
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