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

[Delirium]

Angus McLellan wrote:
> 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.
>   

That sounds like a better argument for list articles than hundreds of 
thousands of stubs. As you noted, Britannica doesn't list them among the 
normal articles, but in a separate set of gazetteer volumes.

If *all* we have is coordinates and maybe population, then we could 
certainly have something like [[List of cities, towns, and villages in 
SomeProvince, SomeCountry]] with lines like:
* [[SomeCity]], pop. 1234 (coord x)
* ...
But there's no real reason to create a separate article at SomeCity 
until we have something more than that.

This is what we do with people too, generally. For example I *could* 
take a bot and expand all the redlinks in [[List of mayors of Houston]] 
to one-line stubs like:
'''Neal Pickett''' was mayor of Houston from 1941 to 1942.
'''Otis Massey''' was mayor of Houston from 1943 to 1946.
...

But I don't because that would be silly.

-Mark