Lsjbot has now completed its run of generating articles for all species,
with 310 000 on plants, making the total number generated above 1 300
000 (source used: Catalogue of Life). With Naskobot, having earlier
generated some 85 000 articles on Swedish lakes and French communes
etc., the total botgenerated articles on svwp are now 1,4 M
The botgenerating efforts have received overwhelmingly positive feedback
from the svwp community, with comments like:
*for editors it has become more stimulating writing new articles on
related subjects. When we write of a place in Sweden we know that all
mentioned lakes have articles, making the article better and more
correct (no lakes mentioned are spelled incorrectly any longer). Also
photo safaris are more fun when all lakes, even very small ones, are
relevant to take photos of and include in articles
*experts are more attracted participating when they are guided to the
stub from Google. Also we get feedback it is much easier to enter
information on Wikipedia when the base skeleton is there already
(taxobox, category, links in wikidata, picture, base sourceref). We see
an increasing number of University classes in biology given he
assignment to write (expand) articles on (not so known) species
We are also gladdened by the hard numbers. Reader accesses show a
healthy increase even from our already high number. And a trend of a
slight decrease of editors has now turned into an increase. We can not
say for certain why and it could be temporary but we believe the
botgenerated articles has a part of this positive development.
Encouraged by this, we will now start what we call Bot Academy. A dozen
of our experienced editors will, with the support from WMSE, learn more
of running bots. First by sessions on basics, common knowledge stuff, in
order for us to be able to use bot as a complement in our editing
efforts. And after that we will have sessions for advanced use, taking
in the learning from Lsjbot and Naskobot, in order to see if also we
can find areas where we from excellent sources can generate articles.
For 2015 we are contemplating the following botgenerating efforts
*lsj (sverker) will support other versions interested to run Lsjbot. He
is now in discussion with Farsi and Arabic wp, where there are some
interesting technical challenges related to the different alphabeticscript
*we will scan best practices of bot generation on other versions (it,
nl, id, vt, serbocroatia, farsi, ru etc) (it seems we have nothing to
learn of this from the biggest seven...)
*lsj will look into using the database used by Swedish libraries, with
info of authors and books. Would it be feasible to generate articles on
authors?
*for myself I am continuing my initiative with the aim of fully
integrate 100000 article of Swedish geographic entities with wikidata,
in order to by the end to generate, if wanted, up to 100000 articles
related to Swedish geography on 200 other versions. There is a lot
needed of quality improvement of the articles first and also the
Wikidata must get better before this can work, but perhaps it will be
possible to get this going for a subset of articles in 2015 even if the
full set will take some years longer before being ready to deploy
Anders
for examples, press "slumpartikel" (random artiicle) on
https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Huvudsida