[Wikipedia-l] 40k geographical articles

Wed Nov 13 23:09:33 UTC 2002

> One of the /major/ points of having an article count is to measure the 
> relative progress of our community effort. Therefore it is not surprising 
> that many people feel that their relative contribution to the project is 
> somehow lessoned in value when a bot comes around and does in three weeks 
> what took 2,000 + humans over a year to do. 

> There is also concern that a critical media reporter might use the fact that 
> "almost half" of our articles are machine-generated against us. If anything 
> we should be as conservative as possible in our article counts to avoid 
> giving our critics easy ways to dismiss our progress.

I generated 30,000 articles on cities.  I also created the same style entries
and added about 3,000 county articles by hand.  That took me about two weeks. 
Now granted it would probably take me two years to do all 30,000 articles by
hand, the fact of the matter is that the ones that I did by hand and the ones
that a bot added are indistinguishable (even the bot entries have variations!) 
This was not just some mindless tool adding raw data with no thought as to its
format.  The bot really just added articles that *I* wrote or would have
eventually wrote.  I maintain that they are just as valid as the ones that were
not added by a bot.  I would estimate somewhere between 500 and 1,000 cities
are already modified.  That is about 2% to 3% of the articles, but still it is
a good number.  Oh, and a media member could probably find hundreds of things
to complain about.  Such is life.
   Ram-Man

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