[Wikipedia-l] Re: EBD and bots

[Daniel Mayer]

Toby Bartels wrote:
 
>It's unreasonable for people to copy in 
>these old texts, include a warning that 
>the material may be biased or out of date,
>and then expect somebody watching 
>Recentchanges to fix them. If I create 
>or edit an entry, then *I* am responsible
>for checking that the material is neutral 
>and accurate. This isn't asking for 
>perfection, a standard that I don't meet 
>anyway, but for a reasonable human judgement 
>that the material is good. Mass copying, 
>whether by a script or not, whether filtered 
>or not, doesn't provide this.

I agree completely. We already have over 35,000
articles and we have done this in year an a half - if
anything we should be concentrating on quality not
quantity at this point. One thing we have is a lot of
is articles. Another thing we have is a lot of are
stubs that need to be fixed. Yet another thing we have
gobs of is unimproved 1911 and other public domain
text that also needs to be fixed. Need we pile on a
lot more at this point with automatic uploads? This
made perfect sense a year ago when there were many
major chunks of human knowledge missing from the
'pedia but is no longer the case (at least in terms of
what is being uploaded -- we already have lots of that
type of stuff). 

>If we want to use the EBD to write Biblically 
>themed articles, then that's great, and I don't 
>expect Neil to do it all himself, but we should 
>set up a Bible article writing group to do it,
>with human editing for each entry before it 
>appears (in the [[:]] namespace). 

It sounds like the EBD would be an excellent resource
for a themed WikiProject -- participants would
rewrite, NPOVize, improve and expand the EBD text.
Remember part of what we are doing here is community
building -- bots don't make for very good community
members. Humans should be the ones that review, fix
and expand content before uploading it. 

But then I'm not sure how we could prevent bots from
doing what they do without also preventing humans who
happen to use text browsers to edit the pedia (banning
bots in general would be nice in the vandal prevention
dept. though). Perhaps all we could do is have a
stated policy on this. 

--mav

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