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

[Anthony]

On Wed, Jun 4, 2008 at 11:24 AM, Stephen Bain <stephen.bain at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 5, 2008 at 12:45 AM, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> * Ease of maintenance - lists are much better. Only one article need
>> be watched for vandalism, bot updates can be done in one edit, etc,
>
> Most simple vandalism isn't dealt with by watchlists anyway, but by
> recent changes listings, whether on-wiki, on the IRC feed or through
> separate tools that monitor these. Having separate articles makes no
> difference to these methods whatsoever, since they're edit-based and
> not page-based.
>
Having separate articles makes no difference for watchlists either,
once you've got the articles loaded on your watchlist.  And
mass-addition of lots of pages to your watchlist is fairly trivial
with "edit raw watchlist".  I'd say having multiple articles is
usually easier for maintenance, and that's not a gut assumption, it's
something I've thought about quite a bit.

That said, if you have so many articles that you can't *create* them
by hand, then you're naturally going to have trouble *maintaining*
them by hand.  And from what I've seen the data being added by this
bot lends itself naturally to a tabular format.  It's raw data forced
into a text form, and I think that makes all the difference.

I've thought about this enough to decide that I don't think these
pages should be added.  If the spam links to Encarta and Maplandia are
removed (and no others are added), I'm fairly neutral on it.  If you
someone wants to waste their time adding a couple million useless
articles, that's their problem.  But the example I've seen with the
links to Encarta and Maplandia seems highly inappropriate.