On Sun, Jun 1, 2008 at 4:47 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
2008/6/1 Fayssal F. szvest@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/