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

[Blech Nic]

----- Original Message ----
From: Delirium <delirium at hackish.org>
To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Monday, June 2, 2008 11:10:05 AM
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] User:FritzpollBot creating millions of new

Nathan wrote:
> For Michel's email to be followed up by Mark's email is almost too much. Was
> that planned?
>  
Although we're both talking about lists, we're talking about somewhat 
different things. He's objecting to the listification of, for example, 
episodes of TV series and characters in movies, when we actually do have 
enough to at least write a short paragraph on each---instead they get 
merged into a huge article with a bunch of one- and two-paragraph 
sections. He objects to proposals to do this for cities as well.

I tend to be a bit of an inclusionist so I also object to that---if 
there's enough to write at least a small paragraph I'd prefer a separate 
article. But I also think it's a bit silly to article-ify what is 
literally a single line in a 3-element table. If we want to do that, I 
could easily create tens of thousands of articles just by expanding our 
redlink lists automatically. In addition to lists of officeholders, 
virtually any article on a family or genus of living thing, for example, 
could have all its redlink species lists expanded out into stubs saying: 
'''''Genus species''''', commonly known as '''common name''', is a 
species of [[general type]]. But what good would this mass creation do 
anything except the article count? If all we have is a list of species 
of ''genus'', with their binomial name and common name, and nothing 
else, why not just put the list in the article on the genus as a redlist 
and wait until we get some more information to write separate articles?

Now if we had a stubbish but not just-database-entry article on each of 
those minor species, I'd oppose an unnecessary merge into [[List of 
minor passerine bird species]] or something, which is another matter.

-Mark


Wikipedia does have stubs with just about that little information on species or less information in the case of plants which seldom have common names.  And they're being created largely by bots from databases.

Blechnic

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