Hello,
I belong to the group of Josh and Ilario and others who have strong
objections against the inundation of "pseudo articles" (one
sentence-articles, bot creations based on database information etc.).
The people who justify their bot creations make two wrong assumptions:
a) about the contributors: "Later, someone will come and improve the
stubs." No, that is not true, at least not in the large majority of the
language versions, and not within the 5 or 10 years we have experience with
this phenomenon.
b) about the readers: "No article is better than none." No, bad articles
create a poor impression about a wiki. If you lure someone to your website,
because Google indicated an article about a topic, and if the article is
far from the expections, you don't give readers a reason to come back.
They'll keep preferring Wikipedia in English.
I can imagine that bot articles about your own topics can make sence: like
Frisian villages in Frisian Wikipedia (but certainly not Hungarian villages
in Basque Wikipedia). There is a realistic chance that those articles will
be expanded.
In general, if a Wikipedia language version does not have an article about
a peticular village in a far far away country, or a star in a far far
galaxy, then the reader should be sent to Wikidata or Reasonator.
A friend of mine is an expert on the Corsican language. He told me about
Corsican Wikipedia: All those mini articles on French or Italian villages,
that's nonsense. Those Wikipedians should better concentrate on
important articles such as "History of Corsica" or "Corsican
literature", they are still very poorly written. (This was in a
conversation from a few years ago, I apologize if the situation is
different now.)
Kind regards
Ziko
Am Montag, 6. Juli 2015 schrieb Asaf Bartov :
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 <jamesjoshua...@yahoo.com
<javascript:;>> 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 <
werespielchequ...@gmail.com <javascript:;>>
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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