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Re: Wikipedia:Verifiability - Mailing lists as sources

From:Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@...>
Date:Tuesday, February 26, 2008, 0:41
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