Hoi, The mail by Anners REALLY deserves attention. It quotes numbers that fly in the face of conventional "wisdom" that bots are bad. Evidently, it is quite the opposite. Given the effects of the Rambot generated articles this should not be a surprise really.
Given that this subject has so prominently featured in the press, it is quite important to learn that the conventional wisdom consist only of opinions and is evidently wrong. Thanks, GerardM
On 17 September 2014 04:36, Anders Wennersten mail@anderswennersten.se wrote:
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
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