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

[Anthony]

On Sun, Jun 1, 2008 at 4:36 AM, bobolozo <bobolozo at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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.
>
If you're going to do it, make maximal use of templates this time, and
have a few sample articles open for fixing and approval beforehand.
The Rambot template contains a lot of flaws that can't be fixed except
by a bot.

That said, I'd probably oppose this bot if I cared enough to come up
with an opinion.