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

[Nathan]

<ref>precognitive vision</ref>

Does that work? I don't have proof that its true, just a strong suspicion.
It seems unlikely to me that two million articles that have gone 7-odd years
without creation are going to be heavily trafficked by editors once they are
created en masse.  Of course it does make it easier for IP editors to
contribute information on these places, which is a good thing. But by and
large, I think it will take many years for these articles to evolve into
something useful.

Regarding the comparison to Rambot - not something I know a whole lot about.
Rambot created articles based on incorporated communities in the US using
census data, right? 30,000 articles according to Tim Starling and 90,000
according to MBisanz. Rambot ran 5 years ago, and the articles are about US
townships - and yet a fair number of them, according to what I've seen and
the debate on the proposal, are still not heavily modified ([[Nemacolin,
Pennsylvania]] is an example). I think you can see how a direct comparison
between these and the Fritzpoll bot-created articles doesn't really work.
Articles about 100,000 towns in Africa are somewhat less likely to be edited
than the Rambot articles were when they were created (at a time when they
represented a significant portion of a much smaller 'pedia).

All that said, I'm not saying it shouldn't be done - just that it has less
value than some seem to have assigned to it.

Nathan

On Sun, Jun 1, 2008 at 12:12 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2008/6/1 Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com>:
>
> > How does simply having what is basically a placeholder entry for each
> > town/village/city etc. alleviate systemic bias? Most of these articles
> will
> > be ignored completely after creation,
>
> I think you're dead wrong there. How many Rambot articles are untouched?
>
> >  Creating 2 million more articles that won't be touched for a decade
>
> [citation needed]
>
> - d.
>
>
>