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

[Angus McLellan]

Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> writes in Message-ID:
<2008Jun02.0717.scs.0003 at eskimo.com>

> Mark Nilrad wrote:
>> Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
>>> bobolozo wrote:
>>>> A small fishing village in Cambodia, or a community of 100 people
>>>> in Kenya, may well have no internet access at all, and if they
>>>> have it, they would not likely be visiting the English wikipedia
>>>> as they wouldn't likely speak English.
>>>
>>> Hmm.  By the same token, I guess we shouldn't have articles
>>> on [[Troy], [[Pompeii]], [[Neolithic Europe]], [[Xanadu]],
>>> [[Atlantis]], or [[Mars]].
>>
>> You're missing the point. I think anyone can agree that Troy
>> and Pompeii have much more global significance than X fishing
>> village, Cambodia.
>
> Um, no, you missed my point.  Arguing about notability or "global
> significance" is one thing.  But it makes no sense to bring up
> the question of whether the location of an article has Internet
> access, or how many people there might speak English.

Hallelujah! Notability is a set of crufty guideline and no more. "When
you wonder what should or should not be in [wikipedia], ask yourself
what a reader would expect to find under the same heading in an
*encyclopedia*."

Now I haven't seen a print Britannica in years, but as I remember it
there were one (or more) gazetteer volumes, page after page of places
with coordinates. If all the bot does is add 2 million stubs, aka
gazetteer entries, that's fine. I'd expect a non-paper encyclopedia to
have a bloody huge list of places, inhabited or otherwise possibly of
use to readers. If 10% of them are expanded into "proper" encyclopedia
articles, that's fine too, we're 200K real articles to the better.

Yes, there are lots of questions to answer about data quality and
implementation details, but as far as I can see, this is a win, win
deal. Creating even gazetteer-quality geostubs from scratch is quite
time consuming. Even translating place stubs from another language is
not all that simple thanks to all the template discrepancies and the
fact that administrative district X has a different name. Let a bot do
the scut work. That's what they are for.

Angus