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

[Stephen Bain]

On 6/5/08, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
>
> 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".
...
> 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.

If you're in a watchlist mindset, yes. This was my point about
recentchanges though: since it's edit-based, not page-based, the only
thing that affects the rate at which vandalism/etc can be dealt with
is the project-wide edit rate. You don't need to know that a page
exists to be able to check a diff via recentchanges, or via some
automated tool that gets its information from recentchanges.

You're only going to have trouble maintaining more articles if the
very existence of those articles attracts more vandalism, but that
view would completely ignore what we've seen through the whole history
of the project, which is that productive contributors are attracted at
a greater rate than vandals. If FritzpollBot articles attract more
vandals, they'll simultaneously attract more contributors.

-- 
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com