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Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-07-16/News and notes

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Printing

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Tweets from Congress

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Could somebody create a Twitter feed showing all the Wikipedia edits from the headquarters of all the Fortune 500 companies? Smallbones(smalltalk) 13:14, 19 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It would be a great idea. However, not all big companies have their own IP addresses. --NaBUru38 (talk) 18:17, 19 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

There is also RuGovEdits (which caught some interesting stuff already). --Tgr (talk) 01:03, 20 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Bot-created articles

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It's very sad to see this trend continuing, especially with species articles. These bots typically use non-specialist databases that simply list every species that has been described, regardless of whether they are currently considered valid. These articles are not maintained by anyone and gradually rot into outdated cruft. And because they are also commonly copied to other Wikipedias, the cruft spreads like a plague throughout the projects. Kaldari (talk) 17:42, 22 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I started an en.wikipedia article on Lsjbot. --agr (talk) 18:48, 23 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Quite so. Off Wikipedia, there are what appear to be "click bait" sites that generate similar webpages from the US GNIS database. So you google for "Obscure Lake", and the webpage that pops up...is click bait that tells you that it's in such-and-such a topographic map quadrant, which you knew already. After a few times, one recognizes them and avoids them like the plague. I worry about the cumulative effect of training our readers to think that 99 times out of 100, our article at a particular scientific name will be a waste of their clicks. I think the potential damage to our reputation far outweighs the supposed ability of this approach to "nucleate" articles, which it doesn't seem to do at any perceptible rate.
What would make much more sense, although I doubt we have the technical means to do it at this time, would be the ability to create these on demand. When someone has a little bit of information or a picture of a species they want to add, they could trigger the bot, and it would spit out a stub for them to edit. That would be much more useful then filling small Wikipedias with grey goo. Choess (talk) 02:45, 24 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
We do have this technical ability (or, at least, we're pretty close). There's a discussion here about how to do it from Wikidata; the results would be crude but probably good enough to tell you (in your local language) "this is a type of bat, it lives in Venezuela, here's a photo" on demand. Andrew Gray (talk) 21:08, 25 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]