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

[Magnus Manske]

On Sun, Jun 1, 2008 at 4:47 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2008/6/1 Fayssal F. <szvest at gmail.com>:
>
>> One major concern... The next generation would believe that Botpedia
>> started on 2001 and that Nupedia and Wikipedia lasted no more than a
>> few days.
>
>
> heh.
>
> I think this bot-assisted programme of article creation is a Good
> Thing for topics where we do in fact have the data. Rambot's 2003
> creation of 30,000 US placenames meant Wikipedia could claim
> *completeness* on the topic. (That's what the "encyclo-" prefix of
> "encyclopedia" means.) There is no reason not to bring similar
> completeness to our coverage of the rest of the world. It'll certainly
> help alleviate our systemic bias.
>
> The issues I can see are editorial - the Rambot articles are data put
> in prose form that these days we'd do with a parameterised template,
> etc - but Fritzpoll seems quite aware of this and the programme
> appears to include considerable human review. Good.

I agree. It might be worth the effort to add placeholders (e.g., HTML
comments) in the wikitext in case information that is missing at
article creation becomes available in machine-readable form later on.
The articles could then be updated with little effort. Yay hackish
database! ;-)

Also, does this bot try to suggest photos of the place in question
during article creation? That might be neat.

> The question that springs to mind is: what else can we get complete
> data on for bot-assisted article creation? Every state-level or higher
> politician in every country ever? What else?

Scientific data springs to mind. Proteins. Minerals. Small molecules.
And the redirects for all the "trivial" names. Now, if we only had a
SMILES extension...

The rfam project [1] has put all their RNAs on Wikipedia for community
annotation. There's a nice wikipedia-academia collaboration success
story!

Species. Where's WikiSpecies? How's EOL [2] doing?

Astronomical objects. Oh wait, we *do* have all these space rocks
covered, at least in lists...


Magnus

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rfam
[2] http://www.eol.org/