Re: Wikipedia:Verifiability - Mailing lists as sources

On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 5:31 PM, David J. Peterson <dedalvs@...> wrote:

> <<
>  No doubt it was the same desire for attention/participants that
>  prompted one person to
>  use a bot to generate 100,000 article stubs in the Volapuek
>  Wikipedia. This raised the
>  Volapuek Wikipedia's position in the list of Wikipedias sorted by
>  number of articles,
>  attracting a lot of attention, not all of it favorable. (One response
>  was a proposal to
>  delete the entire Volapuek Wikipedia.)
>   >>
>  Whoa...  A generator was good enough to do *all* those articles?!
>  Why don't they do them for natlangs, too?  Are they accurate?
They do use them for natlangs.  Back around 2001 or 2002 there
was some controversy about someone using a bot to generate a huge
number of articles about U.S. cities and counties based on census
data.  At that time, if you clicked the "random article" link in the English
Wikipedia, you would get a bot-generated census data article about a
third of the time, if I remember right.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry