There is already a consensus on enwiki (please, hold your rotten tomatoes)
that projects like this which have inflated article counts due to extensive
botting rather than through having a lively community not be included on
the main page. I think a lot of the comments here about a huge article
count attracting communities to curate that content are somewhat
disingenous, it seems that despite having lots of articles there is only
one active user on Waray Wikipedia, who is responsible for more than 99% of
total edits. As Milos has alluded to, "number of articles" is a poor
metric for understanding how useful a particular project is to speakers of
that language.
Speaking here as a speaker of a minority language myself, I understand the
temptation of quickly creating lots of articles to have some sort of
demonstrable impact, and I believe there is a place for some bot generation
of articles on any project. But after hitting "Random" a few times on
Waray, and seeing what came back, I'm not really sure how this is a more
useful resource for speakers of the language than just going into Wikidata
with the interface set to Waray. I believe the time honoured, if slower
way of creating a Wikipedia, lovingly handcrafting it article by article,
is far more likely to lead to a positive impact for people.
Cheers,
Craig
On 7 July 2015 at 07:55, Asaf Bartov <abartov(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Indeed, as Josh points out, there are also costs (even
if only perceived or
reputational costs) to populating a tiny Wikipedia with next to no active
editors with hundreds of thousands of bot-generated stubs. Is having stubs
on all French communes in Cebuano better than having nothing in Cebuano?
Probably, yes. And by increasing pageviews (which is measurable), one
increases the likelihood of "organic" conversion of readers into editors
(which is *still* the most effective way to make Wikipedians, albeit not
the easiest to directly control).
But, again as Josh says, that increase in *editorship* is yet to be
attained. The Waray Wikipedia (btw, "Waray-Waray" is, it turns out,
objectionable to Waray speakers, and is mildly derogatory) is still largely
edited by *one* committed individual, User:JinJian[1], as the stats plainly
show. Given that the bot was run *with* JinJian's consent, there can be no
objection to its operation.
As Milos suggests, there seems to be an emotional response to those
Wikipedias appearing in the top 10 view. This should be divorced from
those communities' sovereign decisions to run or not run the bot. If the
top 10 inclusion truly bothers people, and there's a strong consensus that
Wikipedias largely populated by bot-generated stubs "should" not be
included, a discussion could be had on what this view *should* mean,
precisely, if not plainly the top 10 Wikipedias by article count. And
whatever refined definition is agreed upon (e.g. thresholds like a minimum
number of active editors, or some formula involving the "article depth"
figure, or whatever) can then be made the basis for the list, or indeed,
for a different list, that would be more satisfying for those who are
displeased with being "under" these Wikipedias on the list.
A.
[1]
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaWAR.htm#wikipedians
On Mon, Jul 6, 2015 at 2:04 PM, Josh Lim <jamesjoshualim(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
I can probably speak for those communities. On
the whole, the logic
behind the Lsjbot experiment was simple: build it and they will come.
So far though, this hasn’t happened. We from the Tagalog Wikipedia were
also approached for this experiment, but we know what happens when
bot-generated articles are made: the community is overwhelmed. Out of
that
fear, we declined to participate.
One of the concerns some editors in the Philippines have (and these are
sentiments I share) is that these two Wikipedias turn us into a
laughingstock, willing to increase article numbers at any cost. At one
point, the Cebuano Wikipedia was described as a Wikipedia of French
communes, not content relevant to Cebu or Cebuanos. I don’t think we’d
like that with other Wikipedias in the Philippines or elsewhere.
Regards,
Josh
> Wiadomość napisana przez WereSpielChequers <
werespielchequers(a)gmail.com>
w dniu 6 lip 2015, o godz. 04:52:
These are fascinating experiments, I hope that the Waray-waray and
Cebuano
communities will at some point report back to the
wider community as to
how
> this worked out. My fear is that too fast a growth rate could overwhelm
> whatever community we have in those languages leading to burn out of
> existing editors dealing with too many newbies at once, my suspicion is
> that this will vary by language depending on such variables as the
ratio
of
> PC users to smartphone users, and the ease with which editors can
access
> the necessary character sets.
>
> We have long known that bot creation of stubs that are of interest to
> speakers of a language is a way to recruit readers, and that some
readers
> become editors. What I think we don't
yet know is the maximum growth
rate
that a
wiki community can cope with.
There is also a sustainability angle, though hopefully we can mitigate
that
by bot replacing of articles where the source has
changed but they
haven't
> been edited on the Cebuano or Waray-waray Wikipedias. Otherwise within
a
> decade we could have pedias that look very
dated, for example various
> record holders whose articles in other languages show their records
have
been
surpassed, and villages
WereSpielChequers
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