[Wikimedia-l] Which Wikipedias have had large scale bot creation of articles this year?

Anders Wennersten mail at anderswennersten.se
Wed Nov 27 13:43:02 UTC 2013


On sv:wp our main headaches has not been technical problems in bots but 
inconsistencies (errors) in sources.

For our lakes the hydrological authorities has in some cases called a 
group of nearby and/or conneced lakes with a plural name, like 
"Pikelakes", while the mapauthorities call them different names like 
East Pikelake West Pikelake. And the names in the hydrological 
authorities database has set there for almost 100 years without anyone 
scrutinizing them, like he sv:wp community now does with all names and 
finding errors.

And even if this only is relevant for far less then 1% of all generated 
articles it becomes around hundred in total. Many of these cases are 
quite complicated to fix (area of lakes, depths) and there is a debate 
who should fix these, the botowner (who has generated correctly from 
sources) or community people (who have problems finds relevant 
basedata), or should these be deleted or rewritten from scratch?

Similar issues with articles generated by Lsjot, but here it is easier 
to fix manually/semiautomatic.

The generation of 30000 lakes has otherwise been a huge success.
*We have gone from having around 500 articles to a 60 fold increase. We 
have correct figure for things like length of circumsphere, depth, 
volume Ph-level, which is extremly hard to find manually, not to mention 
the exterm challage that there are examples of  some 400 lakes called 
witht the same name, very hard to handle manually (which data goes to 
which article)
*activities has gone up steeply related to lakes, to get photos to them, 
to edit things like nearby town, small island and even more to include 
corre links from all references to lake in other geogrphic articles
*we also believe we have attracted new editors, who are happy enter data 
of local bathing places etc, but do not have had the comeptence to enter 
a lakearticle from scratch (which IS complicated)



Anders




Fæ skrev 2013-11-27 14:01:
> As well as finding out where this has happened, it would be good to
> have some cases of where "bots went bad" explained. My main concern
> would be leaving a bot to create thousands of articles but in the
> process creating a headache for limited numbers of maintainers, such
> as article copy-editors, categorizers, illustrators, inter-linkers or
> gnomic contributors.
>
> For bot-writers like myself, there may be some common patterns to
> learn from of which projects this sort of mass creation might be
> useful and how to assess a project of this type for potential value
> (we might want to fund some volunteer proposed projects along these
> lines if they can be measured as effective and with valuable
> outcomes).
>
> Fae




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