Similar attempts have been made before in English Wikipedia. Polbot have written a large number of missing articles by cross-checking with IUCN [1].
In Wikispecies, there were bots that have written articles in similar fashion [2], but the bot owner has since gone inactive. For our project, computer programmers are hard to come by because of our perceived strong biology knowledge required to contribute. There are limited numbers of computer programmers who are also biologist (and vice versa). For us, the limiting factor is not the source data website, but rather the programmers who could do such tasks.
We're less than 40 articles away from reaching 350,000 article milestone. Perhaps we should have a brainstorm session on how and where to recruit these volunteer programmers?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Polbot/older_tasks (see Polbot Function #6) [2] http://species.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikispecies:Bots/Requests_for_approval/Mon...
Andrew
"Fill the world with children who care and things start looking up."
From: allan.sauter@gmail.com Date: Sat, 12 Jan 2013 11:27:26 -0700 To: nemowiki@gmail.com CC: wikispecies-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikispecies-l] Fwd: [Wikimedia-l] Lsjbot has now started to generate 1-1, 5 M articles of species on sv:wp
This is a good direction - I apologize for not responding sooner; I just hope, the bot searches the entire web, so as to locate geographical indexing of species: fishnthesea.org. It has some search and display advantages I hope our project can incorporate. The overall model will by necessity be distributed, and fractal in nature. Open-ended input, commenting, and quantifying for validity and interest is the goal. Cheers! Allan
On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 9:55 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.comwrote:
Interesting, considering that Wikispecies itself has 425 thousands main namespace pages in total (including redirects)...
Nemo
-------- Messaggio originale -------- Oggetto: [Wikimedia-l] Lsjbot has now started to generate 1-1, 5 M articles of species on sv:wp Data: Fri, 11 Jan 2013 17:45:25 +0100 Mittente: Anders Wennersten mail@anderswennersten.se Rispondi-a: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.**orgwikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
A: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.**orgwikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Inspired by the botgenerated articles of species made on nl:wp in late 2010 a colleague of mine, User:Lsj, started a similar project on sv:wp early 2012. By October 2012 his bot had generated some 65 000 articles, with essentially complete coverage of all fungi and birds.
He has since then extended the scope to include all living species, both animals and plants, which means another 1-1,5 million articles. Running at full permissible bot speed, the bot generates around 10,000 articles per day, but at a more realistic speed, the full project will take the rest of 2013 to complete.
The botcode has been written in a language-independent way, so that it can be ported to other language versions with only a modest effort. All language-specific text strings are in external files, so the code itself does not need changing between language versions. Beyond Swedish, the code has been tested on Cebuano wikipedia as well; full production on cebwp is ready to go, just awaiting community blessing there.
The source of the core of the data is taken from Catalogue of Life http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Catalogue_of_Lifehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalogue_of_Life but the bot also checks with Commons, other languages(iwlinks) and other appropriate databases, such as the IUCN Redlist of endangered species.
The botcode is written in C# and uses the DotNetWikiBot framework.
Example articles: http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Lichenopora_verrucariahttp://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lichenopora_verrucaria http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Phylactolaematahttp://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylactolaemata http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Rundkrassinghttp://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rundkrassing http://ceb.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Sipunculidaehttp://ceb.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sipunculidae http://ceb.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Solaster_endecahttp://ceb.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaster_endeca
The full set of created articles (includes some other stuff as well, besides organisms): http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Kategori:Robotskapade_artiklarhttp://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kategori:Robotskapade_artiklar http://ceb.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Kategoriya:Paghimo_ni_bothttp://ceb.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kategoriya:Paghimo_ni_bot
My colleague is much too busy now to discuss himself just now, but I think it could be an inspiration for us all.
Besides Lsj himself there are about 10 users supporting him, with checking that the bot generate correct data etc, it has also been discussed extensively on our village pump etc Wikidata is as yet not used
The page where the project is discussed is just now (in Swedish of course..)
http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Anv%C3%A4ndardiskussion:** Lsjbot/Projekt_alla_arterhttp://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anv%C3%A4ndardiskussion:Lsjbot/Projekt_alla_arter
Anders
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