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