[Wikimedia-l] Lsjbot has now started to generate 1-1, 5 M articles of species on sv:wp

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Thanks for the reply.

Anders Wennersten, 15/01/2013 12:15:
> Federico Leva (Nemo) skrev 2013-01-15 11:02:
>> Anders Wennersten, 12/01/2013 12:20:
>>
>> Could you elaborate on this "evolution of the concept"? I'm not able
>> to see what's new, from the "titles" in parentheses.
>>
> This bot puts a template in all generated articles clearly stating it is
> botgenerated and text stating "/This article has been created by Lsjbot
> and can have language errors and/or a mildly confusing setup of
> illustrations. This template can be deleted after checks of content has
> been done/" For the botgenerated articles for birds more then half have
> afterward been manually reviewed. This was our major concern, that
> botgenerated articles must not by a reader be given the impression they
> are manually created.
>
> Example
> http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acanthochitona_arragonites

Oh, sure, such warnings are customary on most bot creations nowadays.

>
> The bot does a major effort translating English text, like the
> geographical name of the area of inhabitance for the specie. In the
> balance of making these translation table too big, and to skip
> translation when complicated, the bot now puts the complicated text on
> the talkpage. In the example above it is for Gulf of California. In this
> way the reader or the one doing the manual afterfix find the info and
> can make use of it.

I don't know if talk page is better than a central wikiproject page with 
task subpages which are usually used for such cases, but yes this is useful.

>
> The set of categories that all bot generated articles will have, even if
> and after it is manually checked/corrected, is partly for general
> keeping track but also to be able to initiate automatic
> check/corrections of a special set of botgenerated articles, if a
> problem/error is found some time after the generating time.

This is very useful, I liked it in particular for the geograph 
bot-uploads on Commons by multichill.

>
> Also there are processes set up for the inspectors of the articles in
> order to easy report any questions, and get feedback it is been taken
> care of. If a backlog occurs of reported problems, the bot generation
> stops, until all is fixed (very few thing being reported by this stage).
> On sv:wp there are around 6-8 frequest contributers in the zoological
> area with 10-15 more infrequent contributers. These are very competent
> and are all supporting this effort with inspecting etc. Without the
> support of these the project would never have got off the ground

I agree, the success of such initiatives lie in how much human work 
they're able to instigate and be supported from.
6-8 editors is much better than nothing. It's still a drop in the ocean 
for such an amount of articles, of course: at least on it.wiki we 
usually have a similar amount of checkers for something like three 
orders of magnitude less articles (asteroids in recent years; Italian 
municipalities in the ~2005 golden age).

Nemo