Sam, I am quite concerned that you would use a public mailing list to express your displeasure about a specific individual's block on a particular project, without ensuring that you had your facts straight. It is unfair not only to the project involved, but to the person who is blocked: nobody needs to have a board trustee shining a bright light on their removal from the project. In fact, your using a specific editor as your poster boy for bot editing without knowing why his restrictions are in place is rather inconsiderate to the editor, the project, and the other people who think you're giving wise counsel.
Before you do that in the future, perhaps it would be a good idea to understand why a project had to, after years of trying to work with a valued editor and to mitigate the problems caused, finally remove him from the project.
Risker
On 4 February 2014 07:05, Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com wrote:
Bot generated articles have been important throughout the history of the wiki Projects. They are essential to our future. They have also always been controversial with some editors.
Agreed that not showing them or remaining skeptical rather than learning to use them better will be a proviso and may lead to forks. I am sad when I see veryactive bot and script users blocked on larger wikis (Rich Farmborough comes to mind from enwp) and perhaps we can find ways to recognize the best bots just as we do articles. On Feb 4, 2014 3:31 AM, "Anders Wennersten" mail@anderswennersten.se wrote:
Nemo has found this wiki which I find very interesting [1]. it contains 1,68 million articles and seems to be a copy of articles from Lithunian Wikipedia + some 1,5 million botgenerated articles, with focus on species (i know from Lsjbot that there are at least some 1,3 M articles of
species
to be found from reliable databases)
The effort seems to be done by just a few lithuanians wikipedians with
the
right technical skill and insight on wikipedia, they are probably active also on ltwp[2].
For me it is a reminder what will happen if we continue to be sceptical
of
botgerneration of articles with correct info with verfied sources.
Creative
people will do it anyway and then outside Wikpedia, which could make Wikipedia redundant in the same way Wikipedia has made the old
paperbased
encyclopedias redundant. The online encyclopedia with most knowledge to
the
readers will survive, and botgenerated verified articles contains more knowledge then no article on the subject. Also note that the most active now are languages like Vietnamese and Lithunian, with small communities
all
aware it will take eons of time if to expected these will be created manually
I do would like the movement and upcoming strategy to make a proactive stand re semiautomted articles
On sv:wp we have had this focus, since last august with including upload on wikidata as part of the articlegeneration. We have found the inclusion of Wikidata much more complex then we anticipated. We thought half a year would be enough to "get a set of items with proper 100% quality data into Wikidata", but we now think it will take something like two years for
just
a small set of 10000 articles :( This have not changed our belief in this approach, but we would certainly appreciate it there were other entities doing the same and with whom we could exchange experience (or a central initiative)
Anders
[1] Start page http://lietuvai.lt/wiki/Pagrindinis_puslapis Latest changes http://lietuvai.lt/wiki/Specialus:Naujausi_puslapiai For random article press Atsitiktinis puslapis http://lietuvai.lt/wiki/ Specialus:Atsitiktinis_puslapis/Straipsnis [2] ltwp https://lt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pagrindinis_puslapis _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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