6 ms·

I'm not very in-tune with Wikipedia's culture (which, I've read, is very nuanced and rigid[1]), but I really don't see why this is a bad thing, given the inform

by dkhar 12y ago

I'm not very in-tune with Wikipedia's culture (which, I've read, is very nuanced and rigid[1]), but I really don't see why this is a bad thing, given the information in the articles is accurate (and the article gives the impression that glitches are rare). If nobody else was going to create an article about some species of butterfly, I don't see why adding that information would be harmful to Wikipedia. Does it make Wikipedia harder to read? Harder to search? I don't think "it's not written by a human" is a valid argument for factual information, and I've never seen any evidence to suggest that it should be one. EDIT: I found this bot's edit log! https://sv.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Logg/Lsjbot https://sv.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Logg/Lsjb... Here are a few articles randomly picked out of the latest 1000: https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urochloa_plantaginea https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urochloa_plantaginea https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brachiaria_vittata https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brachiaria_vittata https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutriana_repens https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutriana_repens https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andropogon_decipiens https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andropogon_decipiens After looking at these, I'm beginning to see why there is some backlash. There are literally thousands of articles here that read "X is a species of grass. It got its name from Y and is described in Z catalog." The only people who would need this information are botanists, and they already have their own specialized sources. I'm still not against bot-produced content, but I understand why some people oppose initiatives like this. [1] http://www.gwern.net/In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism http://www.gwern.net/In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism

girvo 12y ago
Considering the fact that the rules and culture of Wikipedia seem to want people to write like bots, I don't see any issues with letting a real one do the writing for us!
nmrm 12y ago
Reading the article, I think some of it is more of a "why?" than a "why not?", since the articles are factually correct but are mostly just lists of facts and not really something you couldn't find in any number of other resources. For people who do serious article writing, I imagine this might be considered as a "cheapening" their work. For instance, I imagine some editors also resent the notion that encyclopedia editing is somehow reducible to plugging facts into the right templates. Of course the bot's authors don't really believe they are creating articles as high-quality as good human-edited entries, but the emotional reaction on the part of other editors is at least something I can comprehend. I'm not really in tune with Wikipedia, so this is mostly conjecture. edit: reverted edit, added first sentence of 2nd paragraph.
- dkhar 12y ago
  > ...Reading the article, I think some of it is more of a "why?" than a "why not?", since the articles are factually correct but are mostly just lists of facts and not really something you couldn't find in any number of other resources. The argument I'd make for "why?" is that Wikipedia is more accessible and more reliably available than most other resources. I mean, if the government of the Philippines had a web-based, up-to-date list of towns with some basic information, it might make sense to offload the effort of maintaining that information to them. As it stands, though, not even the US has such a directory -- so Wikipedia picks up the slack (or at least it does for towns in the US).
- Crito 12y ago
  > "and not really something you couldn't find in any number of other resources." The same should be able to be said about everything on Wikipedia, since Wikipedia is not supposed to have original research and should have a source for everything. The "Why?" would then be "Because it is better to search for [obscure butterfly] and find a short list of fact than to search for that butterfly and find nothing at all."
  - thret 12y ago
    Exactly. A stub also lowers the barrier of entry for new users wanting to add an obscure butterfly they've just tracked down.
  - urizen 12y ago
    Problem is that for any obscure organism you'll need to know what it is before you can search for it on WP. There is no ability to do that on WP, if the articles on the species has an image the chances are good that it will be a related species. Then there is the problem of some one coming along and adding mangled 'facts' to the article or 'facts' derived from 19th century works.
  - nmrm 12y ago
    > The same should be able to be said about everything on Wikipedia I don't think so. Well-written encyclopedic entries are in far shorter supply than bare lists of facts. I guess the fundamental difference of opinion is between those who feel Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and those who feel it's a dumping ground for human knowledge. Note that I'm not taking sides, just trying to explain the root causes for the difference of opinion. Also, on a purely technical note, I very much doubt that you couldn't find the information in bot-generated articles anywhere else using a search engine. If that were the case, where are the bots getting the data?
chc 12y ago
I think the problem is that the entries are very low-quality and are being produced in such great quantities that it will be hard for anyone to turn them into passable articles. The purpose of Wikipedia is not to be a collection of all the factual information it gather. You or I might wish for it to be one, but that isn't what its creators mean for it to be. Each individual article is expected to meet Wikipedia's guidelines for relevance and to have some minimal level of quality. If it isn't possible to write a good, encyclopedic article on a topic, Wikipedia's stance is generally that it should be deleted (or, if the article is just overly specific and the information is relevant to a broader topic, the article might be incorporated into a section in a more general article).
- aninhumer 12y ago
  I think these stubs have the benefit of reducing the barrier to entry for future contributors. If I search for something and find a stub, I can easily throw in even one sentence, and the article is incrementally improved. Whereas if there's no article, I am much less inclined to make a new one.
  - kevinchen 12y ago
    Exactly: creating a new Wikipedia page is pretty intimidating because most people do not understand WP's template system or how to make an infobox.
MaysonL 12y ago
So where is the deletionist bot to counter his spam?
JoshTriplett 12y ago
I'm normally a big fan of including any and all accurate information on Wikipedia. However, with this many articles, I'd be concerned about the ability of any human editors to actually notice malicious misinformation. If a random person edited one of those arcticles to change an obscure fact to an incorrect statement, would anyone notice?
- Ralith 12y ago
  That's a problem Wikipedia has in general; improvements to Wikipedia's botany coverage are not going to meaningfully change it one way or the another.
boomlinde 12y ago
> The only people who would need this information are botanists I think that looking up plant species are exactly the kind of thing people would want to use an encyclopedia for.
- vacri 12y ago
  These are (almost) one-sentence articles. They're not appropriate for an encyclopaedia. If anything, they should be in a 'list' article format. If you want these kind of one-sentence descriptors, they would be better served in a specialist publication.
  - baddox 12y ago
    If one-sentence articles are considered a problem, that seems like a reasonable choice for Wikipedia to make, but it would apply to human-written and bot-written articles.
    - vacri 12y ago
      It does apply, regardless of the source of the article. Wikipedia doesn't like stub articles.
      - frik 12y ago
        Most articles started as stubs. At the moment many language versions of Wikipedia have different opinions about stubs. e.g. german wikipedia don't allow stubs anymore and the admins delete & reverts more pages every day than new ones are created. It's maybe a cultural problem as such admins identify themself with 'their articles' and don't allow any changes.
        dalke 12y ago
        The question of course is in how to determine when a short article is a stub. Some short entries are sufficiently complete for the purposes of WP, whose English guidelines say "there are some subjects about which very little can be written." Consider http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muati http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muati > Muati is an obscure local god in the Sumerian pantheon. He is associated in some texts with the mythical island paradise of Dilmun, and becomes syncretised with Nabu. That's unlikely to get much longer. For one, the "Dictionary of the Old Testament: Wisdom, Poetry & Writings ..." says "Muati, a god about whom we know very little."
gwern 12y ago
At least part of the problem is that he's generating what one might call 'info trash': he's taking highly structured information from databases, and turning it into natural-language prose, a data source of less value since it's less structured. These prose versions are now going to steadily fall out of sync with the original databases, be much more prominent in Wikipedia and Google, diverge from each other, be harder to parse and perform any complex analysis on (a database is at least relatively comprehensible, but to parse his dumps you have to hope you can reverse-engineer it, no other bots or editors have modified it much, and that he didn't get clever with his format strings), etc. If at some point one wanted to change something about the presentation, it's no longer a matter of editing one template and now the user-friendly HTML view onto the database is automatically updated for all viewers, now one has to run a carefully-written bot on millions of articles (and since that is beyond semi-automated bots, you have to have special permission to run it). It would have been better to work on merging databases or exporting them into a structured site, something like Freebase.
- baddox 12y ago
  Sometimes I appreciate what you call "info trash." For example, I assume there is a bot that turns census data into articles for every incorporated community in the US, like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency,_Missouri http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency,_Missouri. I still think the article is useful as is, with just the map, data sheet, and demographics, and of course many incorporations have additional human-composed information added. I could imagine some more structured data source, where the main article redirects to a table and scrolls to the correct spot. I would be fine with that, but as far as I know that concept doesn't exist on Wikipedia.
  - _delirium 12y ago
    > I could imagine some more structured data source, where the main article redirects to a table and scrolls to the correct spot. I would be fine with that, but as far as I know that concept doesn't exist on Wikipedia. The structured data source now exists, but how to present its data is still being worked out. You can add information to it now, since the goal is to collect a bunch of structured information and then incrementally figure out how to display it, either on its own or integrated into Wikipedia articles (bot additions here are also very welcome): https://www.wikidata.org https://www.wikidata.org I believe there's going to be some offloading of some structured Wikipedia information so it pulls from Wikidata in the future, instead of being maintained "manually" in articles. For example the geotags that are currently buried in Wikipedia articles' markup will probably be centralized to Wikidata soonish and just pulled from there to display. And infoboxes may be auto-populated from the Wikidata information as well. Sending people to auto-generated stub articles when a "real" article is missing is an interesting idea that might happen longer-term.
baddox 12y ago
> The only people who would need this information are botanists, and they already have their own specialized sources. So, that's a nice benefit for botanists (particularly amateur or student botanists), with only a very minor cost imposed on everyone else (namely, the slight namespace pollution, but that's very unlikely to manifest itself). Sounds alright to me.
zobzu 12y ago
I'm completely pro-bots but it does seem this one writes way too short articles with very little content. Bots need to do a similar-enough job to humans while being fast and reliable. Not spam the wiki with names and basically no info.
adamtulinius 12y ago
Looking at [1], the following can be found listed under sources: ^ <![CDATA[Scribn. & Merr.]]>, 1901 In: Bull. Div. Agrostol. U.S.D.A. 24: 26 Maybe he should have done more testing before spamming Wikipedia with mess like that. [1] https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutriana_repens https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutriana_repens
p4bl0 12y ago
> There are literally thousands of articles here that read "X is a species of grass. It got its name from Y and is described in Z catalog." The only people who would need this information are botanists, and they already have their own specialized sources. Except that those articles seem to have good infoboxes. Such structured informations are very useful for many purpose. For instance it is used to build ontologies based on the data on dbpedia/wikidata. These datasets help constructing better semantic tools (like translators etc.). So it's still pretty useful.

by dkhar 12y ago

girvo 12y ago

Considering the fact that the rules and culture of Wikipedia seem to want people to write like bots, I don't see any issues with letting a real one do the writing for us!

nmrm 12y ago

Reading the article, I think some of it is more of a "why?" than a "why not?", since the articles are factually correct but are mostly just lists of facts and not really something you couldn't find in any number of other resources. For people who do serious article writing, I imagine this might be considered as a "cheapening" their work. For instance, I imagine some editors also resent the notion that encyclopedia editing is somehow reducible to plugging facts into the right templates. Of course the bot's authors don't really believe they are creating articles as high-quality as good human-edited entries, but the emotional reaction on the part of other editors is at least something I can comprehend. I'm not really in tune with Wikipedia, so this is mostly conjecture. edit: reverted edit, added first sentence of 2nd paragraph.

dkhar 12y ago
> ...Reading the article, I think some of it is more of a "why?" than a "why not?", since the articles are factually correct but are mostly just lists of facts and not really something you couldn't find in any number of other resources. The argument I'd make for "why?" is that Wikipedia is more accessible and more reliably available than most other resources. I mean, if the government of the Philippines had a web-based, up-to-date list of towns with some basic information, it might make sense to offload the effort of maintaining that information to them. As it stands, though, not even the US has such a directory -- so Wikipedia picks up the slack (or at least it does for towns in the US).
Crito 12y ago
> "and not really something you couldn't find in any number of other resources." The same should be able to be said about everything on Wikipedia, since Wikipedia is not supposed to have original research and should have a source for everything. The "Why?" would then be "Because it is better to search for [obscure butterfly] and find a short list of fact than to search for that butterfly and find nothing at all."
- thret 12y ago
  Exactly. A stub also lowers the barrier of entry for new users wanting to add an obscure butterfly they've just tracked down.
- urizen 12y ago
  Problem is that for any obscure organism you'll need to know what it is before you can search for it on WP. There is no ability to do that on WP, if the articles on the species has an image the chances are good that it will be a related species. Then there is the problem of some one coming along and adding mangled 'facts' to the article or 'facts' derived from 19th century works.
- nmrm 12y ago
  > The same should be able to be said about everything on Wikipedia I don't think so. Well-written encyclopedic entries are in far shorter supply than bare lists of facts. I guess the fundamental difference of opinion is between those who feel Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and those who feel it's a dumping ground for human knowledge. Note that I'm not taking sides, just trying to explain the root causes for the difference of opinion. Also, on a purely technical note, I very much doubt that you couldn't find the information in bot-generated articles anywhere else using a search engine. If that were the case, where are the bots getting the data?

chc 12y ago

I think the problem is that the entries are very low-quality and are being produced in such great quantities that it will be hard for anyone to turn them into passable articles. The purpose of Wikipedia is not to be a collection of all the factual information it gather. You or I might wish for it to be one, but that isn't what its creators mean for it to be. Each individual article is expected to meet Wikipedia's guidelines for relevance and to have some minimal level of quality. If it isn't possible to write a good, encyclopedic article on a topic, Wikipedia's stance is generally that it should be deleted (or, if the article is just overly specific and the information is relevant to a broader topic, the article might be incorporated into a section in a more general article).

aninhumer 12y ago
I think these stubs have the benefit of reducing the barrier to entry for future contributors. If I search for something and find a stub, I can easily throw in even one sentence, and the article is incrementally improved. Whereas if there's no article, I am much less inclined to make a new one.
- kevinchen 12y ago
  Exactly: creating a new Wikipedia page is pretty intimidating because most people do not understand WP's template system or how to make an infobox.

MaysonL 12y ago

So where is the deletionist bot to counter his spam?

JoshTriplett 12y ago

I'm normally a big fan of including any and all accurate information on Wikipedia. However, with this many articles, I'd be concerned about the ability of any human editors to actually notice malicious misinformation. If a random person edited one of those arcticles to change an obscure fact to an incorrect statement, would anyone notice?

Ralith 12y ago
That's a problem Wikipedia has in general; improvements to Wikipedia's botany coverage are not going to meaningfully change it one way or the another.

boomlinde 12y ago

> The only people who would need this information are botanists I think that looking up plant species are exactly the kind of thing people would want to use an encyclopedia for.

vacri 12y ago
These are (almost) one-sentence articles. They're not appropriate for an encyclopaedia. If anything, they should be in a 'list' article format. If you want these kind of one-sentence descriptors, they would be better served in a specialist publication.
- baddox 12y ago
  If one-sentence articles are considered a problem, that seems like a reasonable choice for Wikipedia to make, but it would apply to human-written and bot-written articles.
  - vacri 12y ago
    It does apply, regardless of the source of the article. Wikipedia doesn't like stub articles.
    - frik 12y ago
      Most articles started as stubs. At the moment many language versions of Wikipedia have different opinions about stubs. e.g. german wikipedia don't allow stubs anymore and the admins delete & reverts more pages every day than new ones are created. It's maybe a cultural problem as such admins identify themself with 'their articles' and don't allow any changes.
      - dalke 12y ago
        The question of course is in how to determine when a short article is a stub. Some short entries are sufficiently complete for the purposes of WP, whose English guidelines say "there are some subjects about which very little can be written." Consider http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muati http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muati > Muati is an obscure local god in the Sumerian pantheon. He is associated in some texts with the mythical island paradise of Dilmun, and becomes syncretised with Nabu. That's unlikely to get much longer. For one, the "Dictionary of the Old Testament: Wisdom, Poetry & Writings ..." says "Muati, a god about whom we know very little."

gwern 12y ago

At least part of the problem is that he's generating what one might call 'info trash': he's taking highly structured information from databases, and turning it into natural-language prose, a data source of less value since it's less structured. These prose versions are now going to steadily fall out of sync with the original databases, be much more prominent in Wikipedia and Google, diverge from each other, be harder to parse and perform any complex analysis on (a database is at least relatively comprehensible, but to parse his dumps you have to hope you can reverse-engineer it, no other bots or editors have modified it much, and that he didn't get clever with his format strings), etc. If at some point one wanted to change something about the presentation, it's no longer a matter of editing one template and now the user-friendly HTML view onto the database is automatically updated for all viewers, now one has to run a carefully-written bot on millions of articles (and since that is beyond semi-automated bots, you have to have special permission to run it). It would have been better to work on merging databases or exporting them into a structured site, something like Freebase.

baddox 12y ago
Sometimes I appreciate what you call "info trash." For example, I assume there is a bot that turns census data into articles for every incorporated community in the US, like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency,_Missouri http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency,_Missouri. I still think the article is useful as is, with just the map, data sheet, and demographics, and of course many incorporations have additional human-composed information added. I could imagine some more structured data source, where the main article redirects to a table and scrolls to the correct spot. I would be fine with that, but as far as I know that concept doesn't exist on Wikipedia.
- _delirium 12y ago
  > I could imagine some more structured data source, where the main article redirects to a table and scrolls to the correct spot. I would be fine with that, but as far as I know that concept doesn't exist on Wikipedia. The structured data source now exists, but how to present its data is still being worked out. You can add information to it now, since the goal is to collect a bunch of structured information and then incrementally figure out how to display it, either on its own or integrated into Wikipedia articles (bot additions here are also very welcome): https://www.wikidata.org https://www.wikidata.org I believe there's going to be some offloading of some structured Wikipedia information so it pulls from Wikidata in the future, instead of being maintained "manually" in articles. For example the geotags that are currently buried in Wikipedia articles' markup will probably be centralized to Wikidata soonish and just pulled from there to display. And infoboxes may be auto-populated from the Wikidata information as well. Sending people to auto-generated stub articles when a "real" article is missing is an interesting idea that might happen longer-term.

baddox 12y ago

> The only people who would need this information are botanists, and they already have their own specialized sources. So, that's a nice benefit for botanists (particularly amateur or student botanists), with only a very minor cost imposed on everyone else (namely, the slight namespace pollution, but that's very unlikely to manifest itself). Sounds alright to me.

zobzu 12y ago

I'm completely pro-bots but it does seem this one writes way too short articles with very little content. Bots need to do a similar-enough job to humans while being fast and reliable. Not spam the wiki with names and basically no info.

adamtulinius 12y ago

Looking at [1], the following can be found listed under sources: ^ <![CDATA[Scribn. & Merr.]]>, 1901 In: Bull. Div. Agrostol. U.S.D.A. 24: 26 Maybe he should have done more testing before spamming Wikipedia with mess like that. [1] https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutriana_repens https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutriana_repens

p4bl0 12y ago

> There are literally thousands of articles here that read "X is a species of grass. It got its name from Y and is described in Z catalog." The only people who would need this information are botanists, and they already have their own specialized sources. Except that those articles seem to have good infoboxes. Such structured informations are very useful for many purpose. For instance it is used to build ontologies based on the data on dbpedia/wikidata. These datasets help constructing better semantic tools (like translators etc.). So it's still pretty useful.