Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/FritzpollBot

Moved to subpage by User:Anonymous Dissident from Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals).

Operator response to some issues

Hi there - I actually operate the bot. I've only glanced through the text below, and fully support the community involvement in this process. Let me answer some of the points raised above:

• The example being cited is now out-of-date. Further to discussions at the BAG proposal, the code has been modified to point to sort out some stylistic issues, and to adjust the references. Looking at the new Afghan articles is probably a better guide.
• The bot is stupid! Computer programs are not inherently intelligent, and on a task like this, cannot be left to their own devices. Further to that, my proposal, as implemented and approved has the following steps:

1. Bot extracts data and uploads lists to the subpages of Wikipedia:WikiProject_Missing_encyclopedic_articles/Places which lists all the articles to be created to be manually checked or dabbed by editors before the bot is run.
2. Data is then checked by human editors. This includes checking for disambiguation requirements, any spelling errors not consistent with Wikipedia's existing content, and any other issues.
3. Once the check is complete, I am notified. The bot then scans the list, creating articles for any article that is red-linked - it will not do anything is the page already exists, beyond write out a log to me of all places that it did not create.

• As part of this process, I have encouraged the inclusion of Wikiprojects in these areas - as I upload, and common errors are checked, I hope to contact all interested parties. This will allow consistency within a project, more specialised templates, categories, etc.
• Inclusion of others will also make it more likely that we can find extra data, such as census data, etc. that can be built-in to the article from day one. I am happy to include this where available, provided it is in a readable, accessible and publically available format.
• Each area has its own idiosyncrasies in terms of administrative division, etc. so the bot is already being manually adjusted to cope with some of these. For the technically minded out there, I run the code in debug, edit & continue mode to allow intervention with any exceptions that arise, and to monitor the early stages of creation to ensure that things are being done properly. Takes longer, but worthwhile.

In short, the bot is only a tool for extraction and article creation. It still requires human input, but in a format where human interaction can be very efficient. The timescale is relatively short, but the articles are only created country-by-country, following human eyes (the community here, not just me) confirming the validity of the data. I hope this addresses some concerns about the bot, but I am of course happy (and in my opinion obligated) to respond to any other comments you may have. Best wishes Fritzpoll (talk) 10:59, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Can I also say that it might have been better to wait for me before straw-polling, as there appear to be many misconceptions as to what this is doing? :) Fritzpoll (talk) 11:05, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

An up-to-date example of the bot output can be found at Langar, Badakhshan. Geometry guy 15:45, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

User:FritzpollBot creating millions of new articles

User:FritzpollBot was recently approved at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/FritzpollBot to create stub articles for most or all of the documented villages and towns in the world in the style of User:Fritzpoll/GeoBot/Example. The BRFA means that it is approved technically, Tim Starling has confirmed that there will be no adverse technical effects from such a bot, but I don't believe that this is a non-controversial task, so I'm bringing this here for wider review by the community. The following are some pros and cons of the bot, though not an exclusive list:

Pros

• Articles about verifiable towns are generally considered inherently notable
• This will greatly increase Wikipedia's coverage of geographical places
• The articles will be very standardized, all will have coordinates and an infobox
• A new user wishing to write about one of these places won't have to figure out how to start a new article (the infoboxes for places can be complicated)

Cons

• Many people would rather not have stub articles, this would create close to 2 million new stubs, many of which may not be able to be expanded much more than their original size
• There could be adverse effects with pages like Special:Random and the search function
• Adding new articles like this could be seen as "inflating our article count"
• The "inherent notability" for geographical places may not apply for very obscure villages.

Options

1. Implement bot as written, create ~2 million new village articles
2. Modify bot to only create article on large villages, X thousands new village articles (this is being done anyway 2 million is far from covering every place and google only recognizes the main towns and villages)
3. Modify bot to create lists of all villages, X thousands new list articles
4. Modify bot to create merged mini-articles for all villages on articles about townships, X thousands new and expanded township articles
5. Do not implement bot

FritzpollBot Discussion

So, should the bot go forward as planned? So far its only created 100 pages as a trial before approval, I've asked the operator to hold off running the bot until this discussion concludes. Mr.Z-man 18:53, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

We did something like that with User:Rambot for U.S. places years ago, didn't we? By those standards, it would seem only fair to do it for the rest of the world too. *Dan T.* (talk) 18:57, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

My only comment is about the "inherent notability" question posed above. If there is evidence that the populated place, and so far that's all the bot is supposed to run, can be found in one of the sources they're using, then I think that the place's notability is probably not open to much question, considering that source has a separate listing for it. And I think that there probably could be expansion in the US as well. John Carter (talk) 19:03, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

Iirc, Rambot made 130,000 edits to create 90,000+ articles on places in the US, with populations as small at 3 people. This was back when en.wiki had maybe 100K-200K articles and very few detailed articles. So I really don't see how we can say "no" to expanding such activities to ALL countries in the world, especially when we already have an admitted content bias towards developed nations. MBisanz ^talk 19:15, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

We have an admitted content bias towards things that have sources. I have no objection to, say, an Indian census that gives us demographic data being used to make articles in the same way the US census was. But we shouldn't be expanding anything wihtout non-trivial sources.--Prosfilaes (talk) 17:14, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

I would support this bot, something is better than nothing in these cases, and if the experience is anything like that with Rambot, many of these articles will be expanded and improved, which is icing on the cake. Christopher Parham (talk) 19:22, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

I can't see anything wrong with this. Even a very short stub is better than no information at all. It would be a good idea to have an article on every significant place in the world, no matter how short. Will these new articles have to be patrolled? If so it might slow down new page patrollers a bit. Hut 8.5 19:31, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

This is one of the biggest steps towards counteracting systematic bias on wikipedia in its history and should be welcomed gratefully rather than sniffed at. In answer to Hut of course it won't have to be patrolled, it is a bot sealed with approval and this discussion is several weeks too late. At the time few people seemed interested. As for stubs, the articles are likely to be more informative and far more consistent than people adding a feww stubs without proper infoboxes or references everynow and again. I believe that many of them can and will be expanded. It won't happen over night but real world content should be a strong focus on wikipedia. ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 20:23, 31 May 2008 (UTC) ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 20:19, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

It would be nice of the bot consistently used typical comment spacing. Currently, its output is inconsistent, sometimes using <!-- typical comment spacing -->, sometimes <!--unusual comment spacing-->. The lack of blank lines before and after the ==External links== section is also unusual. —Remember the dot ^(talk) 20:47, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

I didn't start this to "sniff at" it. BAG approves bots from a technical point of view - no bugs, not a waste of resources, won't break the site, etc. This discussion is to make sure that the community actually wants this. Creating perhaps as many as 2 million new articles needs a lot more than simple BAG approval. Mr.Z-man 21:30, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

Can I just say that I've had at least 15 people already say what a great idea it is including people I haven't met before from various fields of wikipedia and already there has been an offering of editors to help out with dabbing to prepare for the bot. ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 22:02, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

I also think this is a great idea, but I also think that this should not be solely under the authority of BAG; this is a huge project, and it should be approved by the general community as well. That said, I hope people do approve it. One note, though: Rambot also used census data to make its articles rather large, rather than just stubs. Would it be possible for Fritzpollbot to do the same, at least in the countries where it's available? I think that could boost the support for this, and would make an even bigger impact on the quality of the encyclopedia. --Rory096 03:59, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

All I have to say (and this was all discussed at the request for approval) is, well, finally. Once this bot creates the millions of articles, I can start working on the FA and GA that I've been dreaming about. A stub is better than nothing at all on a one sentence substub that say absolutely nothing. These articles will be complete with an infobox, reference, cats and stuff. Also, I thought that bots edits were automatically patrolled, like admins. I'm an Editorofthewiki^{[citation needed]} 22:18, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

• I also endorse this bot—our geographical coverage on developing countries must improve if this is to be seen as a thorough, unbiased encyclopædia. Expansion of the articles will be possible in most cases, the only hindrance is that unfortunately we have a lack of editors working at geographical articles. EJF (talk) 22:22, 31 May 2008 (UTC)
• I agree this is fantastic and everything, and I do believe that eventually these will all develop into full articles, but I'm not so sure about doubling the number of articles on Wikipedia overnight. Wouldn't it make sense to modify User:Fritzpoll/GeoBot/Example, so that all of these one-line articles on villages are merged up to the article on the slightly higher-level administrative unit, in this case Waingmaw Township.--Pharos (talk) 22:30, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

I strongly feel that we should Not have a bot creating 2 million stubs. In perspective that is doubling the size of the English Wikipedia which some feel is too big already. We're already tree times the size of dewiki. I'd rather not have every other Random article be an obscure village. We want to find something more interesting through that. Also, they will be perennial stubs. 90% of these will not grow more than the population and location, even in years as I have seen with other articles. Many claim that all real places are inherently notable. I will definitely agree to this to an extent, but not two million articles. Although not every country has a system like the US, any town with an article, especially if it is very unpopulated, should be the equivalent of an incorporated place. The reference on the example above is only another Wikipedia article and the links are only generic map websites! With that, there is not much notability other than existence. The inherent notability argument could be taken much further if necessary. I highly doubt even the best atlases would include these new towns villages. While I agree the we must be countering systematic bias, we are in no way required to have another two million obscure place articles. For example, if a town in Indonesia does not even have an article on the large Indonesian Wikipedia, then I don't feel compelled to have one here. Also, remember that this is by English-speakers for English-speakers, so the Wikipedia hit count will no matter what be very low. In response to Christopher, the US place articles were expanded and improved while the everything else was too. Remember, they were improved by English-speakers likely living in those places, but there will be few of those for these other places. An alternative to two million stubs would be a few thousand "List of places in XYZ" articles, which I feel easier to navigate than individual articles for each place. For the example above, notice how long the article on its township is. Perhaps a list of towns there. A list can still always include the town's elevation and coordinates, the only unique information in the example. Reywas92^Talk 22:35, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

The article on the township is short for a reason. It was also missing entirely until just weeks ago. It equates to district of countries which in the western world have full and detailed articles. It isn't any indication whatsoever of notability. It is a step to try to cover the world unevenly. It is absolute nonsense that articles "shouldn't be started" because of this. Why should America have an article on places with 3 people and towns in places like Burma and Bangladesh with a population of 60,000 be ignored???? ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 23:18, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

That's not quite what I said. I would fully support an article on a 60,000-person town in Burma, and personally, if it isn't incorporated there shouldn't be an article on a 3 person town in the US. I don't think the articles "shouldn't be started" because of that though. A vast majority of the two million towns may have less than 100 however. I'd really like to consider having complete, merged lists of towns in each district rather then one-liners on each town. In theory, something is better than nothing, but there are better ways than having almost nothing. Also, what about population? Or area? Funny how the example is 4.9kb yet 80% of that is forever empty infobox parameters. If this goes through, maybe save some space and only include the important ones that could even ever be filled. Reywas92^Talk 23:30, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

Uh, how would you describe "important"? Most of the supposed "important" ones with populations over, say, 10,000 are also missing article, and due to country's government not making full demographic info available, it is sad that the articles will not expand much. But, I cannot see how anyone would object to having information in the encyclopedia, and merging of most of the articles to the district etc. would be basically giving up the fight agaist systemic bias. If the U.S. has articles on every village with a population of 3 and yet it is incorporated, why can't we do the same to the developing world with unincoreporated villages (I don't think they have a policy like the U.S., just random settlements)? Also, I would disagree with your assertion that the majority would have pops of less than 100--consider overpopulation--and Burkino Faso, where information is available (see http://www.inforoute-communale.gov.bf/list_vill/regionname), most have roughly 900 or so. I could care less about the hit count, for we are only trying to display information, not have the entire world look at us (although that would be great). Most of the other wikis are just as incomplete in the matter as we are, so you suggesting the Indonesian Wikipedia is irrelevant. This bot would save myself and the bald guy a bunch of time creating such article and more time expanding them or focusing on other aspects of the 'pedia. Oh, and there is more notability than existence--the notability of an African farmer who can barely keep his family fed and yet his existence is not even acknowledged for the Wikipedia article has not will not be created because all of us couldn't give enough of a damn to do so. There is so much missing, a bot would be the best and easiest course of action. Remember, we are not only catering to anglophone countries, but the entire world, even if they couldn't give a damn of the aforementioned african farmer. If the best atlases don't include this info, then how are we getting the info in the first place? Anyway, the bot was already approved by User:Dihydrogen Monoxide (who by the way is currently only ~20 votes off of having the largest number of supporters in his ongoing RFA), so there is no need to continue discussion.I'm an Editorofthewiki^{[citation needed]} 00:15, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

I am not suggesting that we have a mere "list" in the township articles. I am suggesting that we include everything in User:Fritzpoll/GeoBot/Example in the township article, with a separate section for every village. The information would be equally accessible to the Burmese or African farmer, and equally open to being improved. The minute that the section turns from a substub into a stub, we can spin it out as a new article. Heck, I bet we could even design a bot that would recognize a slightly expanded section on a village, to recommend spinning it off.--Pharos (talk) 00:29, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

As I said above, BAG approves the technical feasibility of a bot. The job of BAG is to make sure that bots aren't wasting resources and breaking pages with bad programming. BAG does not exist as a substitute for a community discussion like this. Or does the community not count anymore? And DHMO's RFA has absolutely nothing to do with this. Personally, I support lists as well. I'd rather have 18000 lists with a hundred sections than 1.8 million stubs. If we make the lists exactly as the stubs, infobox, coordinates, and all, the only things we lose are things that would be exactly replicated over all the articles like the stub tags. Redirects can be created from the village name to the list and we lose nothing in terms of people searching for the information, but we retain pages like Special:Random as useful features. Once the sections begin to expand, presumably at the same pace as the rest of the topics on the project, they can be split off into other articles and we still retain the list as an index. Mr.Z-man 04:34, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Simply because Rambot made articles previously does not mean that it necessarily a good idea or that it should be repeated. A lot of these places have questionable notability, and creating a separate stub for each seems pretty illogical. What is the benefit to having these articles? What is the virtue of them? Sure, they show a map and the coordinates, but that is available elsewhere. Wikipedia is not a directory. Sure, the information is accurate and verifiable, but that says nothing about the virtue of having a stub that states "X is town in Y," and nothing more. It would be far more logical to create lists of these pages and wait for content contributors to come along and build up the individual articles (if ever that happens). We could similarly create stubs for every single U.S. Supreme Court case or every single television show or every single whatever, but doing so diminishes the value of the project as a whole. It floods the database needlessly and provides little in return. But all of this is beside the point, what is needed, truly, is more discussion. A single BRFA for a project that will / would drastically change the project as a whole? No way. This discussion should be cross-posted to AN, CENT, and anywhere else before this bot starts. Perhaps even a watchlist notice is in order. --MZMcBride (talk) 00:42, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

The problem is that no user probably will ever create all these articles. Also, Mr. McBride, the articles contain coordinates and such, not just a one line substub. Basically what you are saying is that you will reject the information that this bot creates, and IMO villages in Africa are much more notable than "every single U.S. Supreme Court case or every single television show or every single whatever" because they contain People. They woukld create the articleles themselves if they had computers. If we had hald as many users contributing to this area than at the ANI or even the Doctor Who wikiproject there would be no need for this. And yet, basically myself, Blofeld, and a select handful of users give enough of a darn to do such. Remember when Blofeld, AlbertHerring, and myself created the 36,000 stubs on French communes? And now look at most of them, thanks to User:Markussep. If you build it, they will come. And if no one else except Blofeld or myself will do so, so be it. For I'm an Editorofthewiki^{[citation needed]} 01:01, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Note to self: Villages in Africa are not notable. Only villages in Europe and America. Haha! Yeah right. Let the bot go! People who are opposed to it are just short sighted and have no faith in what wikipedia users can accomplish. Wrad (talk) 01:14, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Villages are notable if and only if we have non-trivial sources on them, just like everything else in Wikipedia. All the villages in the US have non-trivial census data on them, and I assume that's true for most of the rest of the developed world. But a set of coordinates is not nontrivial. If Africa wants its villages to be notable, we need source data.--Prosfilaes (talk) 17:11, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

It has to be said that this is the impression people who oppose it give. WHy shouldn't we give other places in the world a chance. There is a whole world out there and I'm certain if you saw some of these places you'd see how a full article could actually be written if the barriers in accessing knowledge broke down, (which I believe will happen over time). It is incredibly narrow minded to think that a full article can be written on a hamlet in America yet an average article that would be created on a population with about 800 in the developing world couldn't equally have a full article. Any notion that "the article is useless in the rest of the world" displays systematic bias at its very best and is the reason why wikipedia has grown so America and the UK are ridiculously well covered (still with many articles missing though) and entire countries and regions of the world are missing in content on here. We would it be so impossible to have an article on a settlement in the developing world where we have basic detail, location and map and population and economic data when it becomes available? I for one think the encyclopedia would be far stronger to cover the world evenly rather than ignoring 95% of the planet because they are not "developed" like us. There is something very wrong if you can't see it is a major effort yo address systematic bias on wikipedia and yes encourage more editors to develop these articles. In ten years time, why is it impossible that many of the initial articles created will have been expanded?? ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 09:45, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Funny, if "no user probably will ever create all these articles," then why are they notable or necessary? I have plenty of faith in what Wikipedia users can accomplish, you rude Wrad; we've gotten here in only seven years, but there's no way we can double the number of articles and assume enough people care enough (per Editor's quote) or know enough about obscure villages to make these much longer. I'm all for creation of the larger towns, but those with a population of less than 100 900 are'nt particularly notable. I'm not being systematically biased, the same goes for the US. Those stubs on French communes: now they have a full infobox, but they're still only one sentence long. You know, to tell you the truth, my problem is not they they aren't as notable, because many of them are, it's that they aren't as long. Really, do you like reading one-sentence articles? Wikipedia may work hard, but we cannot add two million articles and assume that they'll be of decent length in even a few years. Some say one-sentencers are better than nothing, but IMO they're useless. A list, really, would be much more concise, and the articles are reasonable length. Reywas92^Talk 01:40, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

But your're missing the point. I would rather full articles too. But the only thing stopping these "one line articles" becoming fuller articles is access to knowledge, deciated editors willing to expand them, and development and time. MOst of the articles we have on here began as one line stubs and most of those didn't have the referencing and infbox/maps etc that these will have. Trust me in the future access to knowledge will grow increasingly and setting up these articles is a a way of planting seeds for the editors on this encyclopedia to sow. In ten to twenty years when we have half decent articles on all of these places, I'm damn sure people will be gald we took the initiative to do this. ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 09:52, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

You've just proved my point. You don't have faith in wikipedians. You're convinced we can't handle it. Call me rude, but I ain't. I'm just pretty dang right. Wrad (talk) 03:06, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

This information is available elsewhere, but I certainly don't know off the top of my head where to find it. Running this bot will make Wikipedia more useful as a resource and make this information more accessible to our users. These same articles produced by a human editor would be perfectly acceptable, and I don't see a big problem with speeding up the process: the faster the articles are created the soon their growth and improvement stage begins. Christopher Parham (talk) 03:11, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Yeah go for it. Great idea - townships are inherantly notable, and wikipedia as a central information resource should cover them to at least some degree. Viridae^Talk 01:19, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Sounds like a great idea. I certainly think it'd be good for newcomers who want to expand a villages article but can't overcome the burden of creating one. Mvjs (talk) 01:26, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Yes, this bot is a very good idea.-gadfium 01:31, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

This is not a dichotomy between "bot" or "no bot". I think I have made a viable middle-way suggestion on how to modify the bot so that we can still cover the whole world, without a doubling (and this is a literal doubling) of the number of articles on Wikipedia overnight. I would like to hear a response to this suggestion. Thanks.--Pharos (talk) 01:32, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Well that one is easy, just split the list in half and run it over two nights, problem solved. --Samuel Pepys (talk) 01:37, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

The bot will create articles over a period of sevferal months, not one or two days. It's that massive, even if it makes 10 edits a minute 24/7. I'm an Editorofthewiki^{[citation needed]} 01:39, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

If that is the case then the 'overnight' problem is solved. --Samuel Pepys (talk) 01:46, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Um, that's not the point at all. Don't you see serious issues when we double the size of Wikipedia over a very short period, with 2 million substubs? What's the disadvantage of just merging the same information (a full merge, not a list) into the township articles?--Pharos (talk) 01:48, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Pharos, you asked for a solution to a non-issue of 'OverNight' doubling of wikipedia. I don't see the issues here. --Samuel Pepys (talk) 02:03, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Geez, "overnight" is a figure of speech. Please, what is the disadvantage of just merging the same information (a full merge, not a list) into the township articles?--Pharos (talk) 02:30, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

What about the possible vandalism ramifications of this? I realize we have thousands of editors who religiously watch the recent changes, but this seems like an invitation for some of these pages to have inaccurate or spurious content on them for months or years. If a stub is vandalized and it isn't caught in recent changes, it's likely no one will be watching the article and, especially with the low pageviews many of these will likely have, will stand for years. As a possible solution to this, how feasible is a population limitation? I noticed no population is included in the example, but would the bot be capable of including that? We could start with all cities of, say, 50,000 or more. After we see how that goes, the population limit could be slowly reduced. Newsboy85 (talk) 01:46, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Forgive me, but I can not find a good basis for this argument. Taken its logical conclusion it says we should limit the number of articles, even temporarily, based only on concerns of vandalism or concerns of the vandalism life span. --Samuel Pepys (talk) 01:52, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

The differnece is, when the majority of articles are created by humans, the number of articles increases at about the same rate as the number of editors. So unless we are expecting a massive influx of new users soon, it is a reasonable argument, especially since the articles are bot-created, they won't even be on the creator's watchlist. Mr.Z-man 04:42, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

I oppose the proposal and support a population limitation. Two million articles on obscure small towns is far too many. Keep only (1) towns with 50,000 or more and (2) towns where something notable has happened, as determined by a human, not a bot. Dirac66 (talk) 01:56, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

I've read some of the "arguments" above, and I definitely support these additions. Although it will drastically increase the number of articles, I can't think of any major issues against doing this. I think they should all be created, but not extremely fast, because a lot of people are going to wonder what's going on when suddenly we have over 4,000,000 articles. Anyway, I would spend lots of time on these as it would give me something to do. :)   jj137 (talk) 02:23, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Questions

1. Maybe this has been asked already, but what if the bot is used to create articles on towns in one country/region at a time? A controlled, monitored growth in articles is better to resolve the 2 million expansion issue properly, isn't it?
2. Why can't we use the Fritzpoll Bot to create a list or directory, instead of separate articles, of towns and villages? The bot simply has to dig up and list the names and locations in a list rather than create an article? Of course we can have localized lists, by county, district, etc.Vishnava _talk 01:56, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

I agree with the bot and like the quality of its creations, but disagree with the proposed implementation of 2 million at one go (I hold the same retroactively for Rambot, and proactively with the bot that will someday be able to create every USSC case). One datum which should be considered first is that at the bot's current speed of 87 articles in 7 minutes, it would take 112 days of constant operation to create them all. Wouldn't it be better to take a month or two to program it to write somewhat higher-quality articles on the 100,000 most populous cities, and to group the 2,000,000 towns into 10,000 higher-quality (often extant) region articles, completing in say 90 days? While it's both cool and encyclopedia-building to be able to create the 2M, if implemented as is, imagine how many AFDs would arise, turning quickly to CSDs after the community got sick of arguing them. The following needs to happen before this (heartily welcomed, immensely bias-counteracting) contributor is fully let loose:

1. Locate a population database pronto and correlate the data. Start by checking the existence of all cities over 1 million residents and create stubs on the omissions (there will be some). Then go down one order of magnitude to 500,000 and continue stepwise to 200,000, etc. If we cannot find the municipality in some global database of population statistics, it must be regarded as lower priority. I see no reason to proceed alphabetically (the bot has opted to create 99 towns starting with A-M in the first alphabetical province of the first alphabetical nation-- typical computerthink).
2. Tie the appellation of the municipality to its population. All my spot-checked articles say "village", but I presume some of them are larger than that. Have the community comment on what appellations correspond to what population and post the results on the bot's userpage.
3. If the articles are have one-line leads, wouldn't that be nice to have in the edit summary?!
4. Even if it only makes 100,000 articles, it had better be prepared to have the highest quality of formatting (not irregular formatting, spacing, paragraphing), and had better be prepared to fix (most all of) the 100,000 articles if enough people think they should have a mass formatting improvement.
5. After those are done, the regional lists can be created as lists with coordinates and elevation. Data like time zone and preference for imperial units pertain to the subregion, not the village. JJB 02:00, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

How many times do I have to say this: It will take place over a period of several months. And for the 1 million query: We do have editors that can fix the problem before the bot. Do you have a link so that I can go through them? I'm an Editorofthewiki^{[citation needed]} 02:06, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

OK, you did not read JJB's comment terribly carefully, like when he says it would take "112 days of constant operation to create them all".--Pharos (talk) 02:22, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

I think we understand the several months part. I feel that overnight or overyear doesn't make a big difference. That's two million articles, doubling our current extremely large size. WP:FA says there is about one FA per every 1,150 articles. With a doubling, that's only 1 per every 2,300. According to this, the depth of enwiki is 357. With two million articles and one edit each, the depth could change 50%. Newsboys's concern of vandalism which Samual dismissed is a real one. Who is going to be watchlisting two million articles? Reywas92^Talk 02:27, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Oh Dear God. 2.3 million articles is nothing to how this project will look in the future, Wikipedia will continue to grow in article count and in several years time we will pass 10 million articles that is for certain, Wikipedia will grow and grow whether you like it or not.

I dismissed it because vandalism is and always has been a non issue on regard to content. Who is watching the stubs now? Who is watching the archive pages? The thing about vandals is that they vandalize, they replace the whole page or curse or do other things that get them caught by bots. They vandalize enough pages that they eventually get caught and all their edits reverted. All vandalism is caught and more vandalism only encourages more and better anti vandal tools. --Samuel Pepys (talk) 02:47, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

The vandalism can still be caught by RC patrollers, who must catch a fair fraction of it anyway. And I can't imagine who these would be high vandalism targets - vandals are going to go for pages such as Gorge W. Bush rather than an African town they've never heard of. Hut 8.5 08:03, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

• OK, I don't have time to read through all this discussion, but I'd like to give my opinion: I think this is a good idea and that the pros far overweight the cons in this situation. People looking for articles about their home town might now be able to find at least a small entry and I think that any officially recognized town is notable ad eventually the articles are going to be created anyway and never will be deleted as towns are notable. Sometimes I've seen non-English speaking users create articles that are barely comprehensible on towns and a bot for this task would work great. I do however think that all technicalities should come under close scrutiny in the next few days. The bot has much potential to do a lot of damage, so I assume that all disambig bugs are fixed? In a nutshell, I think it is a good idea to have this bot, because it falls under "difficult tasks that would be tedious to do manually" and they are tasks that are going to eventually be done. The Dominator^Talk_Edits 02:15, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

One thing that is less on the technical issues and more about appropriateness: coming from the standpoint of notability for other aspects of Wikipedia, people always point to the fact that WP has stub articles for all these tiny towns and villages in the US, but we don't allow for stubs on fictional characters, every television episode ever, and much more. Personally, I know what the difference is, but I think there needs to be clear reasoning laid out that notability for the resulting stubs is assured to counteract the arguments of those that feel that other areas also deserve stubs. --MASEM 02:24, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

That sounds like an issue to be raised at the guideline for notability. The bot is only following the guideline, not setting it. --Samuel Pepys (talk) 02:29, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Well, I think it'd be a good way to get other editors on to help fix them up, at least. Therequiembellishere (talk) 02:28, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

I like the idea of this bot. There are many holes of towns and cities which Wikipedia does not have an article on. Captain panda 02:52, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

I agree and support the bot as written. I edit in African topics and it's incredibly embarrassing for the wiki that, seven years in, we are still creating stubs for towns that have populations in the tens of thousands, are connected to major political and military events, and/or are the birthplaces of heads of state. - BanyanTree 03:24, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

The Little Red Hen

There sure are a lot of good ideas here on what to do, but I think we're losing focus. The bot task has already been approved by a group specifically designed to do just that. It has been tested. It has been been specifically reviewed by performance experts who aren't a normal part of the review process. All green lights.

Frankly what takes us only a few seconds to type out from the comfort of our edit screens takes the bot builder hours to code, test, and validate, all to do a task he has already been approved to do. This seems to discourage bot builders to do tasks that others aren't doing. IMHO if someone is going to require a bot builder to redo work already approve they better have a damn good reason, or at least help bake the bread. --Samuel Pepys (talk) 02:15, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Doubling the size of Wikipedia is a change quite above the scale of what is normally delegated by the community to the discretion of the bot approvals group.--Pharos (talk) 02:27, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Perhaps that is an issue to take up with the Bot approvals group on limits to their authority. --Samuel Pepys (talk) 02:31, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

I wholly agree with Pharos, a task of this size requires community consensus before being started. The BAG is a technical and quality-control committee, it doesn't decide which tasks have consensus and which do not. Christopher Parham (talk) 03:06, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

According to WP:BOT, a bot needs to meet all of these criteria:

1. is harmless
2. is useful
3. does not consume resources unnecessarily
4. performs only tasks for which there is consensus
5. carefully adheres to relevant policies and guidelines
6. uses informative messages, appropriately worded, in any edit summaries or messages left for users

For most bots, the BAG is able to evaluate all six: most proposed bots are simply automated ways of doing tasks that humans do on a regular basis. For this bot, however, the BAG has decided that they can't evaluate point #4, which is why this discussion is taking place. --Carnildo (talk) 04:53, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

4 is obvious. If it obeys 1-3,5,6 it does better than most editors and has an inherit general consensus under wikipedia's anyone can edit rule (and that includes bots). The bot is already held to a much higher standard of behavior more strictly than other users. --Samuel Pepys (talk) 05:36, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

4 is obviously not obvious, as various editors have brought up concerns in the discussion above. The bot has been approved (on a technical point of view), but not the bot task (on a non-technical point of view). SyG (talk) 12:48, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Discussion is hopelessly convoluted

It is impossible to have any sort of structured discussion here. I recommend that the watchlist notice be taken down for now, the conversation be refactored and moved to its own project page, and that we establish distinct sections for the various issues and options. Thanks.--Pharos (talk) 02:14, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

I've made an attempt at structure by listing several #Options at the top of this discussion.--Pharos (talk) 03:01, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

I agree. The first step in assessing how the community wants to take advantage of the potential offered by this bot is to create a well-structured place for discussion. Wikipedia:WikiProject GeoBot? (For my part, I also agree with you that, at least with the Example case, it would be more useful to have a combined township article with sections for all the sub-stub town content, rather than separate articles. It's not an issue of how many articles get created, but of what the most useful way to present that information is. Collecting groups of settlements together makes the articles more useful for someone actually trying to find out information on these places, rather than just celebrate arbitrary article number milestones.)--ragesoss (talk) 03:03, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

I think Wikipedia:WikiProject GeoBot is a great idea. It would instantly become the most important WikiProject there is, in many respects. This is a huge project we are starting on, and a lot of work awaits us.--Pharos (talk) 03:30, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Of course the discussion is convoluted; it's about one's ability to focus the discussion and keep it as simple as possible that counts. :) Anthøny 06:32, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

More discussion

I am very much in support of this incredible bot. Note that (as was said above) the articles will not be created overnight but over a period of a year, all articles will have a map, geo coordinates, cat, stub template etc (I am also trying to organize automatic wikiproject tagging on these articles) and this will be a good starting point for many of these articles. It is a lot easier for a random individual to come and edit an already created article and add things to it, rather than someone starting it from scratch. Yes its easy for some of us to start from scratch, but for those that have never had wikipedia experience and just came by their town or village, this will definetelly make it easier for them. Oh and if you have a problem with these articles length, I would recomend expanding the hundreds of thousand (if not a million) or so other stubs that are only 1 or 2 sentences long in Wikipedia currently. Then consider expanding all the 1 sentence articles on ALL of the language wikiprojects. I kid you not, many of them in different languages are 1 sentence. What do we do about them? Delete them all for being too short?!?! Rubish! This bot will be one of the best things to come out of wikipedia. Inclussion of more articles and the partial elimination of USA (or [insert western style country here]) bias (it won't completely eliminate it but it's a step in the right direction). Cheers!Calaka (talk) 02:37, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

I have no problem with adding 2000000 articles over night. The only question I have is when do I celebrate articles 3000000 and 4000000?. Zginder 2008-06-01T02:32Z (UTC)

They will not be done overnight. But if that be the case, nothing wrong with celebrating twice as hard in the one night Zginder ;). I also want to remind people that a similar concept has occured with the BOT adding genes/proteins automatically a few months ago. Many people have argued that the articles are only one line each etc etc and that they are non-notable. Notice the patterns... Cheers!Calaka (talk) 02:40, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Huh? Besides, once some user finds what is the 3 millionth article is, it will instantly become at least a B class article because people actually care now that it is a lucky statistic. I'm an Editorofthewiki^{[citation needed]} 02:43, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

We could just lie to the users. Give every 100,000 users a different 3millionth article. Then we'd have a lot more B-etter Class articles. --Samuel Pepys (talk) 02:50, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Interesting idea. Would never work, of course. Database queries could find the exact 3 millionth article, and Wikipedia's too open for something like that. (Yes, I realize it was intended humorously.) Pyrospirit (talk · contribs) 03:15, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Perhaps, but I'd say the vast majority of users wouldn't notice. The bcabal would observe their normal vow of secrecy --Samuel Pepys (talk) 03:18, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

I think that if they are especially obscure then they should be redirected to a section in a "villages in region" type article. Mike92591 (talk) 03:31, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Let's do it! We should be focused on expanding our coverage of everything. Yes, quality is important to, but these articles will increase the overall quality of the project simply because they increase our coverage. What encyclopedia can boast to having an article about every village on the planet? This is a big leap forward in the effort to make Wikipedia the definitive database of mankind! I'm excited! Okiefromokla ^complaints 03:21, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

I like it. One of the first things that new users do when they start poking around with Wikipedia is check out the article for their hometown. Expanding something that was little more than a stub, when I thought my hometown deserved better than that, is one of the things that got me started editing in the first place. More editors = Better encyclopedia. 'Nuff said. - Ken Thomas (talk) 03:48, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Alas I do not share your enthusiasm, and I am one of the more determined Wikipedia promoters whenever the topic comes up in conversation. We are not talking about "articles for their hometown", are we? We are talking about a one line stub about Anywheresville (which may well already be a two line stub called "Anywheresville (South Somewhere)", how will it know?). doktorb _words^deeds 06:21, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Options two and three Create articles on towns of X thousand or more in population and create "List of towns in [Geographic region]" articles as well. -Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 03:49, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

I don't like the idea of this bot. To be honest, I think nearly doubling the page number of our articles without adding anything other than directory-style content is bad. I'd rather say we have 2 million (mostly) substantial articles than 2 million substantial articles and 2 million directory entries. If there is more worthwhile content than "X is a location in Y" to be added to these articles, then they will be created in due time. Flooding the encyclopedia with 2 million articles devoid of any real content that will probably never grow to anything more isn't productive. Quality over quantity. MZM has a good suggestion above about creating a list. As for the systemic bias arguments, I would also support deletion of articles like this already in existence. seresin ( ¡? ) 03:59, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

That wouldn't actually solve systemic bias at all, as it's a product of our userbase's bias towards the developed world, particularly the United States. If anything, most of the articles similar to this are already articles on countries where not many users come from, so there isn't much information. Deleting those articles would just increase the systemic bias. --Rory096 04:03, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

I support this bot. Article count shouldn't really matter, this will go a long way towards helping us be as complete and unbiased as we can, and will encourage people to expand articles about places they know. Grandmasterka 04:13, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Oppose. Articles should be created by people, not bots. The whole point of Wikipedia is that at some point a human being thought some topic was notable and interesting enough to write an article. This editorial function is the most valuable thing we can get from Wikipedia - an idiot search engine can turn up millions of random references just as easily as a bot on Wikipedia with about as much (little) value to the reader. We're drowning in facts, and we don't need bots swamping us with more computer-generated trivia. [[WP:NOT|Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information. Should be a separate project, the Wiki Gazetteer or something like that. Any encyclopedia should be biassed in favor of the noteable and historic, not the obscure and unimportant - I'm sure tens of thousands of articles on English-speaking communities have the same problem and should be deleted. --Wtshymanski (talk) 04:16, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

To the contrary, almost all of our US place articles were created by a bot, and many (most?) of those, once created, were expanded into very good and complete articles with far more information than just the bot provided. However, the bot started the process, and once the article is actually created, it becomes much easier to incrementally improve it. Additionally, Wikipedia's systemic bias is caused by its lack of editors from various parts of the world, so articles that would be considered notable aren't created because we have so few people from the places where people would know about the subjects. A bot would be an effective means to mitigate that bias. --Rory096 04:29, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Views on weather or not bots should create pages should be taken to the Bot Approvals Group and not held directly against individual bots. --Samuel Pepys (talk) 04:37, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Oppose. Despite what some may imply, opposition doesn't have to be about xenophobia or superiority. It is simpler. If no human cared enough to create the article, why do we need it? As the editor above said, articles should be created by people, not bots. 2,000,000 more stubs is not the answer. Niteshift36 (talk) 04:24, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

These articles will be created. By bot or by human doesn't matter, because they will be created. So what's left is a question of how to most efficiently use our time. -- Ned Scott 04:27, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Complete support of bot as written and approved. RyanGerbil10(Kick 'em in the Dishpan!) 04:37, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Comment: Notability. Maybe I am splitting hairs here, but regardless of whether the act was done by bot or entirely the old fashioned way, isn't this stepping over the line by a foot or a mile on Notability? Not everyone would ever consider every town or village on the planet notable just because they exist any more than are Wikipedia's current feelings about anything else. Not every person is notable even if they are very popular in a small area but not well-known in many places. To list every possible map spec even though 99.9% of the rest of the planet knows nothing about each of them and research is probably very limited on most of them because they are so insignificant (no offence meant) seems to me a step in the wrong direction. — CobraWiki ^{( jabber | stuff )} 04:52, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

99% of the planet covered? We wish. The places that show up on google maps are only the main towns and villages in the world. For instance there are 28,000 google maps of places in India, Actually there are 638,000. I doubt even after adding two million articles we would have covered 70% of the world. ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 10:02, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

There's been a general consensus for years that articles on towns are notable; we have an article on every census-designated place in the United States, and that notability doesn't change because of the country. --Rory096 05:04, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Several issues:

• Will the bot copy from public domain sites, such as World Factbook, or other sources? How will the bot cite facts, per reliable sources? How do we know if these articles are not copyright violations? I am sorry to have to say this, but having Wikipedia's articles written by a bot presents to the public an image of Wikipedia editors being lazy and incompetent of adding content if we begin to have articles written by a bot. miranda 05:36, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

You can get an idea of everything from looking at the contribs --Samuel Pepys (talk) 05:42, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

• Resounding oppose - an incredibly bad idea. Wikipedia aims for quality, not quantity; flooding with loads of robot-written articles that amount to nothing is valueless but harmful. ╟─TreasuryTag (talk ╬ contribs)─╢ 07:09, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

• Support - if this has already been implemented for US places, then it would create a strong systematic bias not to do so for the rest of the world. It this is not passed, then a review of the US bot and articles it has created will be needed. --GW_Simulations_{User Page | Talk} 08:07, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
• Strong support to help counter systemic bias, doing it just in the US is a thoroughly bad idea as we already have a bloated coverage of that country, the UK etc. Thanks, SqueakBox 16:47, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

[1] Totally good plan! Would get influx from google maps users providing more information. (I actually recently made some small contributions to nl.wikipedia for the first time in years, for precisely that reason :-) ) Also, could the bot check geographic locations in old articles too? Sometimes GPS locations seem to be a tad off. --Kim Bruning (talk) 17:41, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Change in rationale wording

I support this bot task, but I think we need to make it clear that the rationale isn't "inherent notability". We often tell editors that things are not inherently notable, because just being there or existing doesn't always make that thing/place/person notable. However, the places that would be covered in these articles were not simply just.. "born" (for a lack of better words). To be a town/village/whatever that is sourced then that means some basic criteria was met. -- Ned Scott 04:26, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Nothing here says we can't delete them afterwards. --Samuel Pepys (talk) 04:44, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Which then begs the question "Why allow a bot to create them all?" I can see it now: 100,000 stubbed locations created by this bot just because it can followed a month or two later by 100,000 AfD proposals because none of the articles contain any information other than one sentence or an infobox showing their location, size, and population, and no one can seem to provide any more useful information. — CobraWiki ^{( jabber | stuff )} 05:03, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

100k of 2 million is 5%. That estimates only 5% of the pages would be 'bad'. Likely beats the daily average for new pages created by humans. --Samuel Pepys (talk) 05:07, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

That's irrelevant. The point is that there's 100,000 AfDs, which constitutes an organizational nightmare and utter hell for the 1,000 or so active administrators on the project. Heck, we could have 1,000 extra AfDs from this and that alone would create a very taxing situation for administrators on the project. Sephiroth BCR ^(Converse) 09:51, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Sounds more of a systemic issue within the AfD process. Change the policy, not the bot. --Samuel Pepys (talk) 09:52, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

How is it a systemic issue with AfDs? You're adding 2,000,000 articles to the project. There's going to be articles within that scope that are going to be AfD'd, prodded, or CSD'd inevitably. Even if 1% of these articles end up going this route, that's 20,000 articles administrators have to deal with. And it's the bot that is creating the problem, not the deletion process, which shouldn't have to bend over to accommodate this. Sephiroth BCR ^(Converse) 10:01, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Support creation of all 2 million articles. If we don't like what this does to the random article feature, we should improve the random article feature. I think notability on WP is generally a silly idea and this is a perfect example of how oldfangled ideas about what is "encyclopedic" might limit the utility of WP. Let's not allow that to happen. MaxVeers (talk) 07:00, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Support the bot as written. Maybe it is possible to prevent the random article feature from presenting stubs. --R.Schuster (talk) 10:13, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Isn't the very purpose of the Random Article feature to bring you to an article you might be able to improve that you'd never have thought of? That's certainly what i use it for. Cheers, Lindsay 14:23, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Straw Poll

As the conversation is becoming unwieldy (as opposed to hopelessly convoluted) I move for a straw poll as is consistant on this page--Samuel Pepys (talk) 04:44, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Users who support the bot as written

1. Strong support - As above, the best thing we can do to address systematic bias and put wikipedia on the right path that attempts to cover the world evenly in which any decent encyclopedia should. Why is it impossible that any of the articles on these places can't be expanded once knowledge can be accessed?? Its already happening with place slike Madagascar and Burkina Faso... The allow a bot to do this for every place in America yet deny the rest of the world the right to be covered shows the views of certain people on this site at its most prominent that wikipedia is largely about America or the UK. This is so wrong in my view. The sort of articles that will be created will be places like Agnam-Goly etc, places in the world which exist and actually each have their own stories to tell, but they need to start off from somewhere. Articles such as this show that quite resonably it would be possible to have a fuller article on each of the places drawn up by the bot eventually. I honeslty believe that information will gradually become more available online, this is exactly what wikipedia and information services on the internet is all about -development and access and we have to be a part of making this happen and we are only in the infancy of what will surely develop into the 21st century on a mass scale. This shows that it is actually possible that articles can be written for the "useless stubs" so why should we deny people the right to try to cover the world evenly. Imagine eventually we have two million half decent articles. Is this a positive development of wikipedia or not? Even as stubs with the infobox and location and province details I think they are adequate additions that sjust need expansion. It is far better for wikipedia to take a giant leap and recognize these places rather than delibrately ignoring 95% of the world ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 10:04, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
2. Bots that satisfy points 1-3&5-6 obviously have a general consensus under 'anyone can edit' WP. Bot is already held far beyond the standard set for other users. Samuel Pepys (talk) 04:44, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
3. per WP:NOTPAPER the expansion of the size of Wikipedia is a red herring. All other arguements seem spurious. This seems like a fine task, and I see no inherent problem with it.Jayron32.talk.contribs 05:00, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
4. I like it. MBisanz ^talk 05:23, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
5. Towns and vilages are about the closest we get to inherent notability per long standing tradition and consensus on deletion debates. EconomicsGuy (talk) 05:52, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
6. -- Ned Scott 06:02, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
7. The purpose and value of this addition to Wikipedia is right on. The "sky is falling", and "evil machine" arguments are ludicrous, just as they were in the folk tale, and among the Luddites. —EncMstr (talk) 06:26, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

   Comment I cannot allow that to go without reply. My problem with this insane idea is quite clear. We are, is seems, accepting the right to create 2,000,000 one-line stubs out of the control of ordinary editors. The whole point of this project, I assumed, was to allow every day ordinary people to edit articles. Now I find a Bot is to come along and create millions on my behalf, for my benefit, for my "greater good". Take a look at Aliabad, supposedly a Bot created article from the long list of towns in Azerbaijan without articles. It takes you to an article about a town in India. Great, wonderful, really useful. Are they all going to be like this? doktorb _words^deeds 06:32, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

   ReComment Aliabad was not created by a bot, look at its history. --Samuel Pepys (talk) 06:36, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

8. While I do have concerns regarding the ability of the project to upkeep all the newly created articles, I believe this project should move forward, though at a pace that others can easily monitor...we're not in a race. What I hope for is a rash of editing by folks wishing to further develop the new articles, whereas they may have never thought to create them before. — Huntster (t • @ • c) 07:32, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
9. Go for it per the longstanding consensus on these type of articles but create them at a measured pace as per Hunster. This will be a huge step against systematic bias. Davewild (talk) 07:42, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
10. While it's a major step, I can't see how this would harm Wikipedia in anyway. Yes, it would add a whole bunch of articles on topics I don't care about, but then, the vast majority of Wikipedia is already about topics I don't care about. Towns have long been considered inherently notable, and I for one, would be glad to have these stubs. Tuf-Kat (talk) 07:45, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
11. D.M.N. (talk) 07:56, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
12. If Special:Random is a worry, why not alter Special:Random to de-prioritize articles under a given word count? If it was good enough for the USA to have this with Mr. Rambot, it's good enough for the world with Mr. Thisbot. rootology (T) 07:58, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
13. Support - if this has already been implemented for US places, then it would create a strong systematic bias not to do so for the rest of the world. It this is not passed, then a review of the US bot and articles it has created will be needed. I would suggest setting a low edit rate (one or two per minute), but this doesn't really matter too much. --GW_Simulations_{User Page | Talk} 08:07, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
14. Support Seems like a good idea to plug a large hole in WP that might never be completed by user contributions. Lugnuts (talk) 08:29, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
15. Strong Support Haven't seen a single convincing opposing argument (no offense meant to anyone). Yes, at this stage in our development quality is preferable over quantity. But does that mean we should stop creating new articles completely? Obviously not. These articles will be created sooner or later - there are at least two very dedicated users that come straight to mind who create many such articles (I've even created a couple myself). How can one argue that comprehensiveness is a trait to be avoided when writing an encyclopedia where space is not a concern? faithless (^speak) 08:39, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
16. Strong Support Calaka (talk) 08:44, 1 June 2008 (UTC). I already had a spiel above about the advantages of this project, but I shall restate a number of key points for each of you all to think about:

    1. This will not create 2 million articles in one day. The fastest it can go is at 600/hour or 20 weeks if it went from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. It will not go with out pause. This will take time. It will take the entire year and probably go on to next year.

    2. Thousands of articles are written every day. Like it or not the 3millionth,4th millionth, Nth millionth article will be written give it enough time. This is not about increasing the amount of wikipedia articles just to look all fanciful and stuff. This is about eliminating (partially) the bias that is unfortunately a very real thing.

    3. A bot is consistent. Humans are not. Consistency is efficient. Humans are random. Given that this bot is fully controllable and modifiable, the bot can be arranged so it creates articles now to prevent inconsistencies from occuring later. All these villages and towns will be created sooner or later. The bot will have the advantage of putting them in the correct title, giving them a map, a geo coordinate, correct stub, category and (with the help of another bot -->) correct wikiproject template.

    4. Quality over quantity is nonesense. I propose shutting down 100 language wikipedias and deleting 1 million wikipedia articles for lack of quality if that be the case. We are not saying that this will increase the amount of quality in Wikipedia. But if this project is NOT to run ahead, it does NOT mean we are all of a sudden going to get an increase of 50 FA a month to 500. It will stay the same so we might as well add them in.

    5. Vandalism argument does not hold much ground. Just because there are twice as many articles for vandals to "play around with" doesn't mean more vandalism. If that be the case you would have to assume that there will be an increase in vandals proportional to the number of articles. Then you will HAVE to assume increased number of editors due to increasing Wikipedia coverage.

    6. EXISTANCE of a town/village DOES indicate notability. These are notable places it's just that no one could be bothered (or had the wikipedia knowledge...... or even dare I say it: Internet ACCESS! to be able to create them). Furthermore, what is saying my neighbourhood in my city of a few thousand people (currently a B class article) is more notable than a town in a 'third world country' that no one has heard of that has twice as many people. What has happened in my area thats notable? NOTHING! It just happens to be in a 'first world country'. Bias! My neighbourhood has had no famous people live there and nothing super awesome has occured there.... It is just a regular neighbourhood with regular people... Notable?

    Thats is all...

    ps. I am not trying to make this personal at all (so sorry if it seems that way). I just have not felt more strongly about such a wikipedia concept before and if in the off chance this is NOT allowed, it will be a low day for Wikipedia.Calaka (talk) 08:44, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

17. Support Rambot on steroids. The "notability" arguments are irrelevant, as verifiable population centers have been considered for a while to be inherently notable. Additionally, a project like this would be incredibly helpful for downstream reusers of our content, such as Google Earth. However, I'd be happier if the following two feature requests are done:

    1. A log of entries added separated by geographical region or country, so relevant WikiProjects can verify the additions and update their worklists.
    2. Also, I can't find anywhere where it says how articles are going to be created. Will you use alphabetical, geographical or even random order to throttle the creation of these articles? More documentation would be nice. Titoxd^{(?!? - cool stuff)} 09:10, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

    I am willing to go to a number of relevant wikiprojects and advise them of the creation of articles related to that particular country (I just advised WP:Afghanistan as when this bot is ready it will be the first country to have all the articles written) and this will be good as they will be more in the know of the articles and possibly even add extra info on to them. As for your second point, I am not too sure myself of any documentations but you can just look around the page here at: Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/Places and see if you can find any info. I believe all the Asian countries will have their towns/villages/cities added first in alphabetical order and then followed by Africa. China, India and Russia are all on hold as there is a massive chunk for them (which might constitute a lot of the missing articles). Calaka (talk) 09:26, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

18. Support in the strongest terms. This is the best means of addressing geographic systemic bias that we've done yet, and remedies an issue that was raised when Rambot was run years ago. Rebecca (talk) 09:41, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
19. I support and especially like this reason: "A new user wishing to write about one of these places won't have to figure out how to start a new article (the infoboxes for places can be complicated)." This is extremely helpful. It allows all town articles to be standardized with correct infoboxes and coordinates and it is very helpful for a new user to not have to create a new article but simply expand on one that is already created. A random user who searches for their town and sees it doesn't have an article will probably move on to other things, but if they see their town does have an article they may expand it. I agree the two million number is daunting, and I also agree very small villages probably don't need their own article, but if it's true that every single little village and town in the United States has its own article then it would definitely help make the English Wikipedia more global and more culturally neutral if we applied the same standard to every country. LonelyMarble (talk) 09:52, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

    Another thing I thought of along the same lines: this will allow many town articles to have a high position on a Google search which is yet another way for them to more likely be expanded. But this does have a down side, it could cause a lot more vandalism on these new pages and a lot of information added that is unreferenced. But I don't think vandalism or unreferencing should deter the project because any page on Wikipedia will have those problems. LonelyMarble (talk) 09:59, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

20. support Strongly. Every UK/US place like this gets an article so surely foreign countries deserve articles. Anonymous101 (talk) 10:08, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
21. Support. For all the reasons given above - this is in line with well-established notability policy, and merely extends to the rest of the world what has already been done for the US and UK.--Kotniski (talk) 10:27, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
22. Strong support. My supporting arguments have all been mentioned, but the strongest ones have to do with the fact that these are articles that should be created anyway, and the stubs will now be created in a much more efficient way, leaving the humans to do what they do best, enter actual content, rather than spend time doing things like looking up geographical coordinates (and quite likely get them wrong). Also, this means that the number of "bad" (badly formatted, written in unintelligible English etc) geographical stubs created will decrease. I think this bot is a fantastic idea. --Bonadea (talk) 10:37, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
23. Support this is a very good idea, as it will fill holes in Wikipedia's coverage and reduce systematic bias. To answer some objections: yes we should be aiming for quality and not quantity, but that doesn't mean we can't have both, especially as it will take very little effort to create these articles. Are the bot programmers going to spend their time writing FAs instead? No. Regarding the argument that there is not much information in these articles, there will be more information than Wikipedia currently has - none. When a bot was used to create articles on US towns and villages the articles were expanded, and the same will apply here. It will be harder to detect vandalism on these articles, but we never consider vandalism to be a reason not to add content, a lot of vandalism (possibly even most) is detected through Special:Recentchanges and not watchlists, and African villages will not be high priorities for vandals. The argument that bots shouldn't create articles is clearly flawed, as this is certainly not the first bot to create articles. There is a longstanding consensus that real settlements with people living in them are notable, and one of these articles would certainly pass AfD. I see no reason not to proceed, and plenty of reasons to. Hut 8.5 10:43, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
24. Support assuming enough can be said about each town created to make it at least a good article, which shouldn't be a problem. --Mark J (talk) 10:44, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
25. Support As a new pages patroller, I often come across badly written articles that someone has just put up about their local town. If such an article already exists, the contributions of such people will be better. This proposal would greatly benefit the community, and the fact that such articles already exist for US/UK means they simply have to exist for the rest of the world as well.Wikipedia is not a paper encyclopedia. ninety:one 10:50, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
26. Articles on these minor towns and villages are usually stubs anyway, even when manually written. Do it, says I. -- Anonymous Dissident^Talk 10:52, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
    Note that actually many missing are actually towns with several thousand in particularly Africa and heavily populated places in countries like Bangladesh. Believe it or not I have started many missing articles on cities in places in Africa which have a population of like 115,000 people. IN Bangladesh for instance we only have about 40 articles out of 27,000 that will be created. There must be thousands of articles missing on solid towns even cities with tens of thousands of people. 2 mill is actually only a small proportion of what is likely to fully exist and most of the settlements are likely to have several hundred people living in them. Most of them are likely to be villages of several hundred people which as we know is notable by wikipedia standards already. Basically I use articles like Agnam-Goly which are exactly the sort of places missing in hundreds of thousands in places like Africa and Asia as proff that such places have their own stroies to tell and the first step towards making things happen is to set these articles up and acknowledge their existence. Whether people like the idea of mass stub creating or not, I think it sends out a good message to those who think wikipedia is infatuated by fictional content and is ignorant towards real world content. Well nothing can be more "real world" then covering places in the world we live in. ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 11:48, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
27. Strong support - Ninetyone explained it well. Garion96 (talk) 10:58, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
28. Support. --Heron (talk) 11:17, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
29. Support SGGH ^speak! 11:30, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
30. Strong Support: This is a massive step forward for wikipedia in terms of tackling the bias towards the english speaking nations. Great job at getting this going! --Borgarde^talk 11:44, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
31. Support option 4 (preferred) or "as-is" - Option 4 (create merged mini-articles for all villages on articles about townships) sounds best to me, but I'm alright with the larger version, too. What about adding a namespace like Geo: for them? If anyone ever expands the article, they could be moved into mainspace. Or not. Doesn't really matter. The only reason why Geo: or something like it might be nice would be to help with the Random Article issue (suddenly every n-th article is one of these geo-stubs instead of something interesting). I especially like the fact that articles would be live and ready for anyone to edit, rather than having to be created from scratch (and risk being speedy deleted by overzealous new article watchers). --Willscrlt (Talk) 12:02, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
32. Strongest Support: This will somewhat reduce the systemic bias in wikipedia. Moreover, wikipedia has this goal to culminate in the collection of all human knowledge available for free. Of course, this bot is a good step towards the goal! There is no policy that all articles need to be created by human beings, that rationale sounds pretty romantic though :) It's ultimately the total body of information that matters, not who writes it. Regards.--Dwaipayan (talk) 12:07, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
33. Hemmingsen 12:11, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
34. Support per bot operator. Zginder 2008-06-01T12:23Z (UTC)
35. Strongest support possible per my comments above. I do find it funny that some think that fictioncruft like Doctor Who is more notable and important that improving geographical coverage for places in the developing world. Some of the articles that are not yet even written could be brought up to GA or FA standard. Think about that before opposing a move to make this the most geographically-complete encyclopædia in the world. Regards, EJF (talk) 12:30, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
36. Strongly support the bot as it is. I really like Blofeld's rationale, that we can always expand, but a stub is a great place to start. Also, the argument raised above of WP:NOTPAPER is applicable. I hate this long convoluted discussion that never goes anywhere... Alex Muller 12:32, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

    me too. The time spent on council discussions while important in some cases the amount of time spent here could easily be put into improving the existing "stubs" that we have. But I guess this issue is particularly important hence the discussion ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 12:34, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

37. Strong Support these places are inherently notable. it is going to very useful to have seperate articles for these (rather than lists), since they can be easily referenced in other articles/events/lists etc. It will also invite new editors to expand them. This kind of effort needs to be undertaken in each field (not just geography) so that Random Feature does not just yeild geography articles. I was the bot-owner for the bot that created thosands of towns in India. We had gone through a similar discussion at the time. Thanks, Ganeshk (talk) 12:45, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

    Fully agree with you Ganeslk about this being implemented in others areas. Well put. People seem to think that wikipedia in terms of article content is nearly complete, in fact it is just starting and there ar emany areas which need serious devleopment to evne up the encyclopedia. Once the encyclopedia begins to cover topics evenly and address systematic bias then we can try to make every article full quality and hopefully improve quality as the are being created. There seems to be some misconcpetion that wikipedia is a set encyclopedia and should be complete. Wikipedia has always been about building an encyclopedia. As for curbing growth of articles because every article should be fully developed, wikipedia will double, triple and quadruple in size of the coming years guaranteed anyway whether there is a bot or not, it is up to us to try to develop each article and ensure an encyclopedia of the finest quality and coverage. ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 12:57, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

38. Support Has to be a good idea. --Michael C. Price ^talk 12:58, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
39. Support - would go a long way to countering systemic bias by covering areas of the world that are not adequately represented at the moment. As Blofeld has said, some of these missing places are major towns in their areas. Stubs make it a lot easier for people to add information who would otherwise be put off by the thought of creating a new article. --BelovedFreak 13:00, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
    Not to mention consistency and creating two million references articles with infoboxes that wikipedia is yet to achieve in seven years..... ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 13:07, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
40. Great idea I appreciate the comparison to Rambot's US places: all the doomsday predictions about vast levels of vandalism to these pages didn't happen to the US places, even though when those articles were created, there were far fewer editors and admins (and I don't know, were there any antivandal bots then?) to keep track of this. Systematic bias is a big thing, too: we've got tons of US place articles, and I'm working on expanding them slowly (see my recent contributions), but I (and probably tons of other geography-focused editors, too) don't have the sources for non-US places like I do for US places. Nyttend (talk) 13:01, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
41. Support - quality, referenced stub with infoboxes? Brilliant! I feel sure that this will encourage the expansion of many of these stubs into interesting and full articles. guiltyspark (talk) 13:03, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
42. Strong Support; I have always thought that, though Wikipedia will always be unfinished, one of the project's achievements will be in creating most possible articles in some defined areas. Articles on places are some of the easiest to create, and this proposal goes a long way to addressing the inherent asymmetry in that process, as well as speeding it up and making it more uniform. Of course, by minimising the western bias in geography articles, this creates a new bias favouring geography articles as a whole, but I think that bias of discipline is less unacceptable than bias of nationality. Ross^English 13:03, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
43. Support A great idea. If it can be coupled with appropriate Wikiprojects following up and expanding the articles, even better. --Malcolmxl5 (talk) 13:07, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
44. Strong support. If possible, I think it would be good idea to do a 10,000 edit run, and re-assess, and then do a 100,000 edit run, and re-assess. This will give the community scheduled times to retrospectively determine how well it worked, which should allow minor nits to be discussed without anyone jumping on the big stop button. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 13:11, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

    It essentially is throttled due to the need for human intervention in checking the data, per the spec above Fritzpoll (talk) 13:13, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

45. Complete support Will go a long way to correcting the lack of coverage of non-English speaking countries. Yes, a lot of them will be stubs for a long time, and yes there is quite some scope for undetected vandalism, but in the long run it will be beneficial. Martocticvs (talk) 13:16, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
46. Support. If something is notable enough to have an article we shouldn't care who wrote the first stub on it, a human or a bot. Shanes (talk) 13:22, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
47. Support I suggested the idea in the first place. I'm an Editorofthewiki^{[citation needed]} 13:24, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
48. Strong support, although: would it not be possible to hide these places from "random article" until someone else than the bot has edited them at least once? --Aqwis (talk – contributions) 13:35, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
49. Support This bot is awesome. I have faith in wikipedians and believe that we'll see some of these new articles become GAs and FAs soon enough. Wrad (talk) 13:43, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
50. Support It might not be possible to manually create all these articles - so we will have these articles within a short span of time, they can be slowly upgraded manually as time goes by. Around The Globe^Contact 14:21, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
51. Absolutely. RyanGerbil10(Kick 'em in the Dishpan!) 14:30, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
52. Strong Support This bot will seriously help out, since being a town or village is, in my opinion, the closest thing you can get to automatic notability. Kivar2 (talk) 15:27, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
53. Support - helps to combat systematic bias.--PhilKnight (talk) 15:41, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
54. Support, Implement bot as written, we're not paper and this will help fight our developed-world/USA bias. Tim Vickers (talk) 15:45, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
55. Support, a big step towards a comprehensive and unbiased encyclopedia. --Skizzik ^{tell me, what have I done?} 16:12, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
56. Strong Support I absolutely 100% approve of this and it's been a long time coming. This will greatly improve Wikipedia's quality as a reference work.Orange Tuesday (talk) 16:30, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
57. Support - Will go along way in combating large amounts of systematic bias on Wikipedia, and a bot will set the basis for a good article with an info box, references section etc. - which will be very helpful in the long-run. A lot of the articles may remain stubs for a long time - but I do ultimately find encyclopaedic information better than no information. Camaron | Chris (talk) 16:36, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
58. Support - All the articles the bot creates will be notable, and a basic stub is better than nothing at all, so there is no reason not to implement the bot in my opinion. - MTC (talk) 16:50, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
59. Support very strongly indeed. I am staggered at the ignorant parochialism of comments such as that those on en.wikipedia are all English native speakers living in the English speaking world and who would be interested in places poutside ther English speaking world anyway. Truly staggered. This proposal can actually counter systemic bias and be a real step towards our actual goal, which is educational. Especially in this modern agee of jet travel it feels such an appropriate suggestion and am really rooting for it to be accepted. Thanks, SqueakBox 16:56, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
60. Very Strong Support -I agree with most of the assessments above regarding the fact that that inherent notability is a given, and this is such a useful tool to get these articles going. I have no doubt that once run, many articles will see immediate expansion. I'm looking forward to seeing it run. Carter | Talk to me 17:00, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

    Articles can be quickly expanded in two minutes flat. There seems to be some idea that they wiLl never be expanded. IMagine how article like Kushgag will look once proper information becomes avilable on the web. I fail to see how this doesn't have any benefit for the encyclopedia at all ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 17:05, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

61. Support This will counter systematic bias. Vandalism can be picked up by RC patrollers. --Patar knight - ^chat/_{contributions} 17:12, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
62. Support - I've read the arguments here, and the proposal itself (which it seems few objectors have done!), and think this can do nothing but good.--Ukslim (talk) 17:20, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
63. Support with the caveat of running it only on countries where there is some interest from editors to do the followup work. This will slow things down a little and with User:Blofeld of SPECTRE being a so prolific writer he and his gang will do a lot of that followup work. In fact using the bot to do the grunt work allows for the more detailed work to be done by humans. Agathoclea (talk) 17:22, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

    By involving the wikiprojects before creation, we hope to achieve this very aim. It should also help with the watchlisting situation, since editors from those projects will be more inclined to watchlist these pages and work on them Fritzpoll (talk) 17:26, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

64. Support Especially since the opposers don't seem to know that we already have many articles created by bots, for plants and animals, and other places. GlassCobra 17:31, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
65. Support, though I would like it to also do what I brought up below as it would save all kinds of time on the part of the members of various country WikiProjects. ···日本穣^{? · Talk to Nihonjoe} 17:39, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
66. Support. A wonderful tool to help make Wikipedia more complete and more useful. Dovi (talk) 17:50, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
67. Strong support. Helps add content on things Wikipedia should cover. Articles that exist are more likely to be improved. Increasing the size of Wikipedia is not a compellingly bad thing. --Alynna (talk) 18:01, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Users currently withholding support

Users that would support under modification or specific criteria

1. Will support if lists/tables/sections with redirects are used for really small towns. Mike92591 (talk) 17:27, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
2. I would support creating articles for towns above a certain population (to be determined later), with the rest in lists with redirects, or just lists and redirects. Mr.Z-man 06:13, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
3. Villages and small towns in the English-speaking world, maybe, as they are likely to be created at some stage anyway. The majority of stubs about villages and small towns in the rest of the world—including Europe and Latin America—will never be accessed. Scolaire (talk) 06:29, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

   How would this mitigate systemic bias? If anything it would just further it. --Rory096 07:29, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

   Furthermore, either villages and small towns are notable, or they aren't. If you are happy for all English-speaking ones to be created without further comment, why are these more notable than those ones in countries where people don't speak English? Fritzpoll (talk) 11:41, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

   This is English Wikipedia. People will read/edit articles about their own village or town, their family's, their friends' etc. But the majority of villages in the non-English-speaking world will never be accessed, as nobody on en.wikipedia will have any reason to ever have heard of them (unless, of course, the bot will create stubs on villages in French-speaking areas on fr.wikipedia only, etc.). And I said nothing about systematic bias. I am talking only from an efficiency/worthwhile-ness point of view. Scolaire (talk) 16:51, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

   Yes but this is not wikipedia of the English speaking world. Your opinion that most of the even Latin American and continental European is both daft and plain wrong, and actually it may comes a shock for you but wikipedia is an educational project and geography an educational subject and the rather silly comment that people will only access places they already know directly contradicts the educational goal. Thanks, SqueakBox 17:06, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

4. Create articles by order of population and stop at X, then halt and wait for a new consensus of whether to continue or not and on how that continuance should be conducted. Starylon (talk) 06:58, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
5. I support the suggestion of JJB above. Start with towns with large populations, and gradually move on to smaller ones. -- Nudve (talk) 07:07, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
6. Per John J. Bulten - controlled, measured growth. Vishnava _talk 07:18, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
7. Agree with starting with largest populations and working down, stopping at each order of magnitude. I would also like the bot to not create any stubs–like its example–that don't provide a population number, as that is pointless. Such stubs should be nominated for speedy deletion as they don't assert notability even by the generous rules that all populated places are notable. Phlegm Rooster (talk) 07:28, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
8. While I'm still not thrilled with the idea, I do understand the argument do this to fight systemic bias. I'm withholding support in the hope that some sort of population limits will be implemented, at least to get the project started. Newsboy85 (talk) 07:56, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
9. Per comments at #Reference Issue automated construction of article need to be perfect examples of a good article, even if it is a stub. Example User:Fritzpoll/GeoBot/Example does not even meet the most basic requirements of WP:V and WP:CITE#HOW with a reference link to National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency a Wikipedia page! Jeepday (talk) 13:21, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
10. Same opinion as Z-man. Complete mini-articles about all the villages, containing the infobox and everything, should be merged into the township articles. So we get (say) 10,000 relatively substantive new and expanded articles with the same information content, ease of access and ease of editing, instead of 2 million substubs. These can always be spun off later if the article develops from substub to stub (and we can deploy a bot to detect when this happens).--Pharos (talk) 13:27, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
11. Options two and three seem to be the best. I'm not sure what this is going to do to our random articles or our server lag, though. I would support if the bot will make articles that qualify for sufficient notability, and if sufficient sources can be found, unsuitable articles can be put up for PROD, AfD, or CSD. ~AH1^(TCU) 15:15, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
12. This is a great idea, but two million articles is too many. A handful of people living in a place doesn't make it notable on its own. Start with the towns with the largest populations, and relegate those below a certain threshold to lists. I wonder, though, whether the threshold should be relative rather than absolute, to ensure that all major towns in each country are covered. ThreeOfCups (talk) 15:24, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
13. This idea is fine in principle, but devil is in the details. I think most of the problems could be addressed if the proposal was scaled back by a factor 10 say. In particular I am against the the automatic generation of 2 million new stubs on any topic. Much as I admire the dedicated work of those working to counter systemic bias, this should not be done at the expense of the readership, the wider interests of the encyclopedia and contrary to policy. The rambot exercise was badly done, and the 100000 articles on US villages are stuff that exists as a consequence of that.

    This discussion may be over-influenced by the political nature of the systemic bias issue. I suggest thinking of other examples where this idea applies: for instance, would we support a bot to create stubs on each of the 350000 described species of beetle? Systemic bias comes from the demographics of the editorship. However, to some extent, this reflects the demographics of the readership: this is the English language Wikipedia after all. It is a laudible goal to educate a readership mostly coming from North America about the rest of the world and Wikipedia can do a much better job at this than traditional encyclopedias, but this should not be taken to an extreme. 2 million articles on world villages would seriously imbalance the encyclopedia, affecting, for instance Special:Random.

    Contrary to popular belief the number of articles is not growing exponentially and there are rough limits on how big it will get: it is limited by what can be attributed to reliable secondary sources. I think there are serious notability and verifiability concerns about articles on tiny villages. We do not normally allow websites as reliable secondary sources, even (or perhaps especially!) governmental intelligence agencies. Furthermore, it is proposed that this data is checked and corrected by Wikipedia editors, who are by definition not reliable sources. On the otherhand 200000 articles would focus on the more notable places, for which it is more likely that reliable secondary sources can be found, and is a much more reasonable scale for an endeavour of this kind. Geometry guy 16:22, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

14. I would support with a population limit, for many of the reasons given above. I can't see above that anyone has mentioned the large number of duplicate articles this will almost certainly cause, given the varying naming conventions existing articles have. Let's face it, few of 2m new articles will be checked manually in the foreseeable future. I am also concerned at the effect 2m bot-articles will have on public perception of WP. Unlike some, I think the rate of growth of new articles will slow considerably, as many types of article are largely covered. If this goes ahead we will gradually cease being "the encyclopedia written by schoolkids" to our critics, and beome "the encyclopedia written by computers" which will be even worse.Johnbod (talk) 17:09, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
15. Withholding support on current implementation plan, as above. JJB 17:28, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
16. I think this is a great effort, but as mentioned above I think it should start with large villages only (if up to a million articles or more is fine with me). Then I think we should see if those articles have progressed any or have proved notable, and then decide if we want to go further. I also wonder why Maplandia.com was chosen out of all the sites possible. I am sure people will put a lot of time and thought into the template. Danski14^(talk) 17:36, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
17. Withholding support per comments above. Would support starting with larger towns first, as a trial run. Are there samples of the proposed bot pages available? Pete Tillman (talk) 17:42, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
18. After skimming the discussion above, I agree with the proposal to create lists for the places with small populations, and redirects to those lists from the placenames -- that will help keep maintenance of these articles manageable, and any village that someone actually has something to say about beyond population and location can eventually have a full article developed about it. I've been coming across hundreds of apparently bot-generated substubs about French locations that are apparently utterly abandoned, completely orphaned, unreferenced, and with little prospect of being expanded in the next decade. Creating event another 2 million articles like that (so that half of Wikipedia's content would be undeveloped place stubs) seems unproductive. Maybe with lists we could limit the total number of articles produced to some tens of thousands instead of 2 million, and each new article would be more likely to have someone interested in taking care of it, too. -- Avocado (talk) 17:55, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Users who oppose entirely

1. Oppose I still feel that existence does not equal notability. As a new pages patroller I struggle daily against a rising tide of non-notability where Wikipedia instead of being an enyclopedia is just a weird replacement for the internet itself, where almost all things already have an entry. The country doesn't matter to me; the notability of the entry does. This will just be an automated and officially supported mass-dilution of an already melting encyclopedia. "Hey, I drove through a town with three people in it. Does it have a Wikipedia entry? Yes! And what does it say? Hmmm, almost nothing. Yay!" Multiply that experience by 1,000,000 and you'll understand how I feel. Rob Banzai (talk) 05:52, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

   3 people??? Most of these places have several hundred people at the very least. In the thrid world many of the places are likely to have several thousands of people. We are missing thousands of articles on towns in place slike Bangladesh and all across Africa some of which have a population of over 50,000. Not the 3 people settlmeent you are visualizing. ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 10:22, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

   As far as I understand the proposal, the bot does not intend to create articles only for places that have several thousands of people, but for all places. Hence even places with only 3 people would have an article created by the bot. SyG (talk) 13:12, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

   Only 28,000 google maps locations out of a possible 638,000 places in India and many other countries ar elikely to be the same. Is this what you call adding an article on every place?? 2 million article may seme huge but I guarantee that is a far cry from covering every place hamlet or dwelling as this prooves. ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 13:22, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

   Agreed, 28,000 is not everything. I stil think, however, that these 28,000 should be filtered to list only the notable ones. There are various criteria (population, length, ...) that could be used to confer automatic notability. The other ones (i.e. non-notable through the automatic criteria devised) could go into lists. SyG (talk) 13:30, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

   I can see that Blofeld is going to hound anyone against this idea to the ends of the earth so I rescind my oppose vote. Why not just make a stub for everything that ever existed anywhere, just in case? Oh right, we already have something for that: THE INTERNET. Rob Banzai (talk) 14:33, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

   But I thought that Wikipedia was supposed to be the most comprehensive site on the web or in the entire world. Besides, if this bot is rejected Blofeld and myself would simply create the 2 million article manually. It might take ~10 years, but I hate the ignorance that is shown here in regard to treatment of articles. I'm an Editorofthewiki^{[citation needed]} 14:49, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

   Probably that is a critical point of disagreement. I suspect a lot of persons who oppose this Bot believe that Wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopedy, not "the most comprehensive site on the web". For my part, I think there is a huge distinction between those two notions, and I would tend to think the most comprehensive site on the web already exists and is called Google. SyG (talk) 14:59, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

   I agree with SyG on this. Wiki is not Google. Wiki is not the Internet. Wiki is not an atlas. I cannot see how a robot creating 2 million articles "on our behalf" will help human editors keep Wiki close to its original purpose. If you want to create the 2 million articles manually, go ahead, but as with all one-line stub articles, they may be subject to AfD if they cannot be shown to be notable, just as the Bot articles would doktorb _words^deeds 15:12, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

2. Oppose This seems quite the most bizarre idea I have ever read on Wiki. It seems impossible to follow the discussion in full, but a lot of the points seem to have been made very clearly above. To include millions of stub articles "just because we can" is like filling a writing the words "Shopping List" at the top of every sheet of a writing pad. It may well serve a purpose at the time, but come three days later when you want to write a job application, you've just a writing pad full of potential shopping lists. I guess this proposal is already too far "down the line" for the likes of me to have much sway on the matter, but I have grave concerns about the direction Wiki is taking here. doktorb _words^deeds 06:18, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

   Addressing systematic bias by giving other same size places in the world as in the United States an equal chance to develop compared to a shopping list??? Now that's bizarre ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 10:33, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

   You have missed my point entirely. If you write "shopping list" on every page of a writing pad, you have a perfectly good pre-prepared item for jotting down all the little bits of shopping you may need in the future. But when you need to write a job application, all you have is a writing pad you've written "shopping list" on. In other words, it's fine to create 2 million articles as a "just in case", but when you want to use Wiki as an encyclopedia, all you will find is nothing more than you could get from an atlas or a Google search. doktorb _words^deeds 15:16, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

   The current systematic bias could be solved in other ways, e.g. by deleting articles on non-notable US towns. The bot could also create other forms of systematic bias, e.g. by stating implicitely that any hamlet in the world is notable, while fictional characters are not. SyG (talk) 13:15, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

3. Oppose Wiki is not paper, but it isn't a dustbin either. As argued above, it will enhance Wikipedia's quantity but not its quality. I am strongly in favour of taking the German Wikipedia as an example and creating no more robot articles at all. Steinbach (fka Caesarion) 07:23, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

   A dustbin? Thats how you refer to articles that cover the world that can be expanded?? What about all those lists of fictional anime characters etc that wikipedia has in the thousands. ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 10:19, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

   A list with thousands on instances is easier to manage than thousands of articles. For example, if a list with fictional anime characters is non-notable it can go to an AfD, in a much easier way than thousands of dispersed articles. SyG (talk) 13:18, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

4. Resounding oppose - an incredibly bad idea. Wikipedia aims for quality, not quantity; flooding with loads of robot-written articles that amount to nothing is valueless but harmful. ╟─TreasuryTag (talk ╬ contribs)─╢ 07:09, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

   And yet all these articles will be referenced--How many articles can say that? A majority, but over 100,000 don't. The will be expanded by myself and Blofeld. I'm an Editorofthewiki^{[citation needed]} 14:51, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

5. What do you want Wikipedia to be? This has a few neat side-effects—such as dishing out coordinates for many more places to third parties that use coordinates in articles—but I don't think we're an atlas. How do you envision these articles developing? If someone with familiarity with a village adds some information to its article, it will be "unreferenced" and therefore de-valued by the community. If little to nothing "encyclopedic" can be said about these locations, do we really want another 2 million permanently empty stubs? Regarding systemic bias, you could just as well argue that this approach is an affront to the cultures we're supposed to be engaging. People counter bias, not bots. –Outriggr § 08:20, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

   "If little to nothing "encyclopedic"". Who are you to judge the world that you don't know about?? Doesn't it seem strnage that a full article can be written about an unincorporated village in America which is very encyclopedic but that the same sort of the size place in other countries isn't "encyclopedic". "People counter bias not bots"?? A bot is merely a tool to emulate a human editor in creating new pages but far more rapidly and consisently. It is then the responsibility of editors to expand and develop these articles, but the unevensss of which suggests gross systematic bias. We write the articles for sure, but actually a bot is the first step intially to counteracting the bias in coverage on here that humans generate. Quite the opposite to what you;ve said here ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 10:30, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

   If an unincorporated village in America has an article while being non-notable, it should go to AfD. If a place in another country is notable but does not have an article, then an article should be created. The common point of these actions is they are both human, because notability is judged by humans. If we want to be sure that no "important" (in terms of size) town is left without its article, then some size-checks could be incorporated in the bot. SyG (talk) 13:27, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

   But most off the articles in America became well devekloped over time; why wouldn't the same happen to African villages? IF YOU BUILD IT THEY WILL COME. I'm an Editorofthewiki^{[citation needed]} 15:03, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

   So you are saying that is probably best if we allow 2 million stub articles to be created on the promise of some kind of "magnetic attraction"? As has been said before, Wiki is not an atlas. Some of these villages have not had articles created becuase no one feels they are notable enough for the English Wiki. The idea that building one-line stubs will act as a beacon for future editors seems rather naive, with all due respect. doktorb _words^deeds 15:10, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

6. Resounding oppose - Thousands of taggers stand ready to improve these articles by adding false and unverifiable information about villages in Myanmar, Central African Republic, India, Paraguay, and Taiwan. The Guiness Book of Records stands ready to honor the editor with the greatest number of undetected Wikipedia vandalisms. Lou Sander (talk) 08:39, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

   See, you admit it yourself-- there are more assessment taggers than article builders. Just look at the 100 articles the bot has already created--they are all referenced.I'm an Editorofthewiki^{[citation needed]} 15:03, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

7. Oppose. I don't like the idea of having 2 million articles created by a bot. It is a natural process to have real persons to create articles. These persons are also the most likely to watch the articles for accuracy and relevancy of content being added. It is also quite natural that there are more articles on small towns and villages located in the English speaking world at the English Wikipedia. Much the same as there are more articles on Swedish villages at the Swedish Wikipedia. It is a matter of supply and demand. I do admit that this bot creates useful and well-formatted stubs/articles, but I don't think it is within the scope of this project to create a complete database of every settlement in the World. --Kildor (talk) 09:28, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

   Why not? The Rambot was not a person, The KotBot was not a person. You admit people couln't give a darn about most of these--but we are an all-purpose encyclopedia. They are all accurate and sourced.

   I don't know about the Rambot and KotBot, but I still don't think articles should be created by bots. Yes, they are certainly accurate and sourced, for the moment. But who is going to watch them? --Kildor (talk) 15:32, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

8. Oppose - (Don't support generating the articles or any of the options originally listed. Lists would not be as bad as individual articles.) Would like to widen the debate by considering other options. How about running the bot at user request to create individual entry when a user wants it (make it available/publicize it/use a template to invoke it/whatever). See my more detailed comment below #Generate content dynamically - run bot on user requested page only Zodon (talk) 09:27, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
9. Oppose. The articles created by the bot are effectively conglomerations of elements of some database, it seems. Creating millions of articles will completely unbalance the striving for a reasonable overall article quality. It has to be expected that the vast majority of the articles created will never get any further edits or attention. Indeed, as pointed out by somebody above, quality, not quantity should be the aim of WP. One thing I would support is a bot which creates such a stub article at the request of an editor, but not automatically. Jakob.scholbach (talk) 10:33, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

   A complete database?? Who said 2 million articles is anywhere near covering the world?? For instance we have 28,000 google maps for India, According to the 2001 census there are 638,000 settlments in India alone. What will be added is far from a complete coverage, they are the main towns and villages from each country which is not a full coverage. If we were to try to cover the world 100% I'd imagine we'd be looking nearer 10 million new articles. 2 million is actually only a proportion of places which google has shown up to be a "notable" place. ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 10:38, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

   Then maybe we could focus the discussion on deciding whether all places shown in google maps are inherently notable ? Because if there is consensus on that, it seems most of the arguments against the bot would fall off. SyG (talk) 13:33, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

   Populated places are inherently notable anyway so no debate needed ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 13:38, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

   I would tend to agree for cities and villages (even if I am not aware of a clear Wikipedia Guidelines stating that), but not for hamlets. Is there some evidence that the 28,000 places in google maps are at least villages, and not hamlets ? SyG (talk) 13:50, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

10. Oppose First off, Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information, so there is no reason to have an article about every last one-man hamlet (don't think they call them hamlets across the world, but you get the idea) in the world. I took a look at the example article, and it's not referenced, it contains minimal information, and I'm sure they are all going to be similar to that. As people have said, Random article would be a mess with en.wp's size doubled ir better. Who wants to click on it and 3/4 of the time get some eight-foot wide CDP? I don't know how close we are to filling up Wikipedia's servers, and, as Blofeld of SPECTRE said, we might end up with 10 million or more articles. This would easily slow down everything, and possibly limit how many potential FAs and GAs we write. Sure, I would like to see stubs on larger towns and cities across the world. I agree with Jakob.scholbach that it would be better for the bot to create a stub on request, not by the millions. I also don't like the idea of an automated bot writing our articles. What good are us as editors then? Heck, come a few years from now, I bet we're going to see bots developing featured content. Also, I would imagine CSD and AFD would be backlogged with these articles on the non-notable locations. And, unlike the majority of the articles that currently exist, most of the stubs can't be expanded past stubs, as there won't be any more information. I am amazed at how advanced our programing and bots are getting, but I don't like this idea one bit. Juliancolton ^{Tropical Cyclone} 11:52, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

    What I don't understand is why people automatically assume that because there is a great dela missing that they are naturally hamelts of 3 people. Not at all. Note that actually many missing are actually towns with several thousand in particularly Africa and heavily populated places in countries like Bangladesh. How can you just pass them all of as "non notable"??. Believe it or not I have started many missing articles on cities in places in Africa which have a population of like 115,000 people. IN Bangladesh for instance we only have about 40 articles out of 27,000 that will be created. There must be thousands of articles missing on solid towns even cities with tens of thousands of people. I guarantee the average place started is likely to have hundreds of people living in them or at least qualify as a notable inhabited settlement above a hamlet level. WHy are you so locked out of the idea that actually something could be written for them over time? . For instance India has 28,000 settlements on google maps. Actually there are 638,000 that exist. This for me proves that the articles started are the main towns and villages in these countries. ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 12:03, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

    Blofeld of SPECTRE, you have badgered almost every oppose so far, saying basically the same thing. I understand you have your opinion, but other people have their own, and you don't need to try to prove everybody wrong. Also, I didn't say all of them are going to be non-notable. But if we have an article about every last documented settlement in the world, some of them are bound to be non-notable. As I have heard other people state, if the Indonesian Wikipedia doesn't have an article about a certain village, there is no reason at all for use to haveone. Juliancolton ^{Tropical Cyclone} 13:08, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

    The example page being cited was the first go! The actual trial created articles with a better sourcing. As for your comments regarding technical matters, I assume these were already considered by BAG who approved the bot's operation. Plus, we don't worry about performance when adding content. I have commented on the usefulness of more information in my response at the top of the page Fritzpoll (talk) 12:00, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

    Using the poor development of another wikipedia, particularly like one in a country like Indonesia is one of the lamest criterias for notability than I have ever seen. A city with a population of 400,000 is a one liner on Indonesian wikipedia so that means, ahhh, not much to know about that then. I'm not doubting that a lot more can be written about some places than others but I'm sure you would find that actually a lot could be written into the encyclopedia on just about any populated place. This has been proved by the many full articles which are eeven FA'S on villages or small places... ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 13:14, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

    Ah, but the only reason we have FAs on small vilages is because we have living people to work on them. The bot is just going to create stubs...short, uesless stubs with no more information than can be found a map. My oppose still stands, especially per Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information in WP:NOT. And while there are indeed going to be notable towns that don't have articles, there are going to be far more with three people. You tell me what good it is going to do by increasing Wikiepdia's size by more than 2-fold with articles about those places. The only thing it can do for us is fill our servers, backlog our processes and stress the system as a whole. And consider this; with millions and millions of more articles, we're going to have twice as much vandalism. Who's going to spend all day reverting the doubled vandalism rate? Juliancolton ^{Tropical Cyclone} 14:56, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

    I've got a fairly strong opinion about this. There are a lot of places in the world where they are possibly unable to create their own pages due to lack of availability of computers. How are they to get their voice on WP? This is i=not making WP an indiscriminate collection. It is giving people a voice who would not otherwise have one. Carter | Talk to me 17:05, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

    But in the vast majority of these small locations throughout the world, the only people who have ever heard of them are the persons that live there. And if they don't have computer access to write the articles, why do we need them? There is an entire internet for people to write blogs, articles, and news stories about every last bit of information in the entire world. Wikipedia is not within that scope. I can't imagine seeing two million one-sentence stubs about non-notable locations in Encyclopedia Britannica. So, since we are just as much an encyclopedia as Brtiannica, why should we include all that information? Juliancolton ^{Tropical Cyclone} 17:18, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

    I don't think you should say, "And if they don't have computer access to write the articles, why do we need them?" Implying that someone who doesn't have computer access' opinion doesn't matter is silly to me. Everyone's opinion belongs as long as it's not vandalism. Everyone should have a say. Carter | Talk to me 17:29, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

11. Oppose Citing WP:NOTE in the case of tiny villages; and in the current vandalism climate, articles about notable places should have their defenders. What better way to ensure this than to wait for a human to create the page? In a bid to expand Wikipedia beyond the world view of Wikipedians, the quality and reputation of the encyclopedia will be damaged as a result. One lot of censuscruft shouldn't excuse another. Where are all the ADW people? -- Regregex (talk) 12:55, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

    Where did you get the idea they are all tiny villages??? We are missing tens of thousands of articles on towns with thousands of people in. Read the comments above . Not only are humans spending hours checking out these places and planning things first but humand have proved to be extremely useless at creating consistent articles with references for towns and villages, I've spent weeks cleanning up peoples mess and trying to make articles by country consistent. The bot is the best way to start them initially and improve considerably the chance of expanding them ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 13:09, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

    Never said they were all tiny villages. Got your point about consistency but Wikipedia is not a data harvester, it needs the human touch. Search engines are the place for scraped automated statistics. To find them in an encyclopedia supposedly hand-crafted by humans is pretty insulting -- way to say "Nobody cares about your town." A non-existent page would be better. -- Regregex (talk) 13:43, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

    Well such an outlook that "nobody gives a damn about your town or village in the world" is precisely the ignorance that has seen wikipedia develop in the way that it has, seeing the world from an Anglo-Centric viewpoint rather than actually how the world should be represented evenly. There are already thousands of articles on here which show or in a search engine as "automated" when on wikipedia we ahev half decent articles with images. Why would it be impossible eventually for people to expand articles and show we are better and more valuable than the other sites? ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 13:50, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

    Blofeld, I fully respect the view you are making, but it does not stop those of use who oppose this Bot and its work from being very worried about the consequences of such a massive article creation programme. You have made it very clear that there are thousands, maybe millions, of potential articles in line for creation. If, say, a tenth of these are one-line stubs with an infobox, is that really an improvement? Surely we can get the articles you desire - for every place and settlement on earth - without having to create millions of one-line summaries. Why is it so apparantly and seemingly important for this Bot to be let loose on the project, creating articles "on our behalf"? Are human editors no longer required, because that is how it is starting to look to me. This Bot is a very worrying phenomenon and I think we all have the right to express our concern doktorb _words^deeds 13:59, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

    Note that these articles will be created over a period of a year or more and not all by tomorrow morning. A lot of work still needs to be done. Furthermore I have to say that having "something" is better than "nothing".Calaka (talk) 14:25, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

12. Oppose How useful is it that people will type in the name of a village and get ... nothing. Then Wikipedia will be regarded as a big empty pointless space. This is a community not a computer-generated space to be coloured in. There's a very good reason why the english-language wikipedia is dominated by articles relating to the english-speaking world. If you think about it long enough you'll understand. Why not have a bot make a list, and have a automated creation of one of these perfectly-created pages as soon as someone thinks its notable enough to be created Almost-instinct 14:08, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

    Note that there is information provided in these articles on location, administrative area and coordinates. Census information along with other sources can be added in due course. The information is available; unfortunately few editors are willing to volunteer to do this work.
    What is the good reason that our coverage on non-English-speaking places is so woeful? Just because an encyclopædia is written in English does not mean its contents must only relate to people and places in the English-speaking world surely? To answer your final point, you have proposed the system that is already in place. The bot makes a list, we have decided on the notability of villages and towns (that is, they are notable) and then the articles are created. Regards, EJF (talk) 15:32, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

    If, for instance, a typical, unimportant Spanish village is notable enough to have an entry in an encyclopedia, then - in the majority of cases - the people who think it is notable will be Spanish-speaking. The natural place for the article written by these people is NOT the english speaking wikipedia. Or do we think that something has not been noted, unless its been noted in English? Almost-instinct 15:50, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

13. Oppose Maybe the incrementalist in me is speaking here, but I simply see no point in creating hundreds of thousands of de facto permastubs that no one but a bot wanted to have. If people want to write about an obscure location, they are free to create an article, and no-one will mind. Let humans be the selectors, not stupic bots. (I am however neutral on the bot creating lists of locations with incoming redirects.) – sgeureka ^t•c 14:15, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

    Have you not read any of the proposals???? The content generated is sorted by humans. ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 14:19, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

14. Oppose I think the discussion about this Bot is a wonderful opportunity to review entirely our Notability Guidelines about places, and to decide once for all (or at least once for a while) proper criteria infering automatic notability for places. Running this bot would be an implicit assumption that all places are notable by mere existence. This should be discussed and transformed as a Wikipedia Guidelines before we act (or not). SyG (talk) 14:22, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

    Again, it is widely accepted that populated places regardless of size are inherently notable. I;ve seen hundreds of sub stubs far worse than the bot types articles thrown out of afds with a resounding keep because of WP:SNOW. ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 14:42, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

    If that is the case, it should be made a Wikipedia Guideline. Only then can we allow a Bot to create automatic articles for places without appropriate scrutiny. SyG (talk) 14:54, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

    See Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Common_outcomes#Places, "Cities and villages are acceptable, regardless of size". Regards, Ganeshk (talk) 15:43, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

    I'm inclined to agree with this sentiment. If we can gain a formalised expression of this apparently "widely accepted" principle (please don't take this as a dispute that it exists!) then the bot will have more of a leg to stand on, so to speak. Oli Filth^(talk) 15:18, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

15. Oppose I decline to give my reasons (though they exist) because virtually every editor who has so far has been "answered" in a badgering, hectoring manner that i don't care to open myself to. Allowing discussion is great, but the same person making the same arguments over and over, whatever is said, is not discussion. Cheers, Lindsay 14:44, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

    Hear hear! Since my points didn't get refuted I can't decide if that means that my contribution was (a) fantastic or (b) beneath contempt ;-) Almost-instinct 14:49, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

16. Oppose In the nicest possible way, I fail to see what useful purpose this can serve. As far as I understand, what we would be condoning here is data-mining and re-presentation of information that's already readily accessible from other directories, on an unprecedented scale (as far as Wikipedia is concerned). Well, we already know that Wikipedia is not a directory. The overwhelming majority of this information will never be expanded upon (i.e. the majority of these articles will remain as stubs for an exceedingly long time), so statistically, it's not as if this would be sowing the seeds of greater things to come (quite the opposite from an administrative point of view, as far as I can see). And as for arguments of systematic bias, I feel that would be much better served by getting rid of some of the already-existing US-oriented stubs. So other than the feel-good factor of vastly increasing the article count, and the show-off factor of "what other encyclopaedia lists two million villages?", I just don't see any benefit here. Oli Filth^(talk) 15:01, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
17. Oppose Per SyG. Let's decide what is an is not notable. Hamlet with a population of 3 = non-notable (and pace Rambot, I wouldn't mind at all if tiny U.S. towns were deleted, either). IronDuke 15:15, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
18. Oppose I thought I'd better go on record since my name was mentioned previously in a positive context. I think Rambot was a mistake, and I think this would be a much bigger mistake. Since only very few people (perhaps nobody) will be able to make regular edits to millions of articles, collaboration and incremental improvement to the template will be severely restricted. So the quality will generally be very poor. This is exactly what we saw with Rambot, we had 30,000 articles built from a template which was written and updated by a single person. The template was poor, and this poor quality impinged on public perception of the whole encyclopedia. -- Tim Starling (talk) 15:36, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
19. Strongest Oppose We need to work on our re-existing problem of thousands of stubs before throwing another two million on. Reywas92^Talk 15:39, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
20. Oppose let's focus on quality rather than quantity. In addition, as noted by somebody else above, I doubt many of these places (especially smaller towns and villages) are actually notable on their own. Better to cover them, when necessary, on the corresponding municipality's article (if any, and only when actually useful). --Angelo (talk) 16:23, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
21. Strongly oppose -- WP needs to increase its coverage of non-western issues, Botgenerated stubs are not the way to do it. I would be willing to consider creating pages for collections of locations (villages, etc.) that are approximately article length with each notable location redlinked. I think the automatic addition of articles on American geographical locations was also a bad idea--most of the locations would have had articles created eventually anyhow, but now the prose is written around a bunch of census data that doesn't need to be there. -- Myke Cuthbert (talk) 16:48, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
22. Strong oppose: Harebrained at worst, misguided at best. Who's watching all these useless, one-sentence pages? Cannot see any justification for adding 2 million substub articles, I'm sorry but an infobox is not content. Rambot created tens of thousands of articles, with minimal, albeit more, content and years later there are tens of thousands of articles that have nary another edit, languishing in obscurity to say "Bob Smith likes men" for all time. I think the amount of time and resources that Wikipedians have has been badly overestimated. Sure they're notable but doubling the size of the project is a bad idea unless you plan on doubling the number of active editors, it took what, 7 years to amass 2 million articles? And now we are going to double that overnight? Doesn't make much sense to me. (Also I don't mean overnight literally, so spare me the lecture). IvoShandor (talk) 17:19, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
23. Strong oppose. It may be possible to create articles in an automated fashion, but it should be recognized that Wikipedia is maintained by humans. Already now, we have rather too many articles to maintain; about 16% are flagged for cleanup, and the backlogs seem endless. We rather need to focus on improving existing articles than creating new ones. At the moment, the scope of Wikipedia is at least limited by the time of people who create articles - with mass creations by bots like these, the idea of having a maintained encyclopedia becomes entirely ridiculous. --B. Wolterding (talk) 17:22, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
24. Oppose Awful, awful, AWFUL idea. I don't see the utility in adding millions of pages that are nothing more than a one-sentence description of a red dot on an orange map. The overwhelming majority of these articles will NEVER be expanded beyond that, and no one's going to be looking up a 43-person town in western Zimbabwe, anyway. I'm all for countering systemic bias, but this doesn't do that. Systemic bias is not determined by what has articles in WP, but by how things are covered in WP. The article for New York City will ALWAYS have more information than 99% of the articles threatening to be created by this bot. This is a horrible idea -- plain and simple. — MusicMaker5376 17:35, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

    Just like Kushgag. Yeah there will be no editors at all willing to actually write any decent article whatsoever. Automatically created by the bot of course means that they are locked from ever developing for life. How do you think wikipedia ever started? What we have today is precisely the result of limited starter articles ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 17:51, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

25. Strongly oppose — This proposal is a massive accession to the other stuff exists argument. Many of the more reasonable supporters claim that adding a stub article on every village in the world would counter systemic bias in Wikipedia, apparently because we have already made such a robotic accounting of US places. Some of the less reasonable ones have argued that this accounting is rightful compensation for our tolerating "fictioncruft" or whatever proliferation of articles on characters from various books and games; that this self-serving position has a place alongside the other argument suggests to me that the whole rationale is weak. Why should we create an article on a subject in which it is not known that a single person has an interest? I don't believe that the concept of "notability" could ever apply to such an article: the word itself is an inherent claim of interest to some people. A priori, the only people interested in an article on a random village are the inhabitants of the village, and for many places, in fact this is the permanent extent of interest. More people live in the apartment building across the street from me than live in many of the places that would get an article under this proposal; furthermore, that building is better documented than these places, its residents have more personal and professional connections than their residents, and it quite possibly exemplifies numerous aspects of artistic, architectural, and urban planning paradigms, not to mention historical trends, that no sleepy hamlet anywhere in the world could lay claim to. Yet it would be absurd to write an article on every structure in New York City. We must decide when writing the article that the subject is interesting; otherwise, we rightfully delete articles which concern, for example, not-yet-notable academic figures (who might nonetheless produce good stuff in five years). This proposal is also a knowing violation of the spirit of "Wikipedia is not a dictionary". An article on a random town, containing only population information and location, with negligible chance of ever being more than this, is exactly the same thing as an article on an obscure term containing only its definition. To my mind, the prohibition on dictionary definitions is a statement of what an encyclopedia should be: not an enumeration of facts (which are merely true, something that is the case for more statements than we would ever consider including here), but a compilation of knowledge: facts which reflect research, conversation, the interaction of ideas, human intellectual accomplishment. If we often miss this mark, that is no excuse for tossing the idea entirely. Ryan Reich (talk) 17:49, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
26. Oppose – millions of unreferenced stubs with no further oversight, watchlisted by nobody and prone to vandalism. And I don't quite understand where the documentation comes from. Is it really that reliable, without mistakes? Most unlikely. Thus it is an extremely dangerous proposal. Colchicum (talk) 17:51, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

+ problems with romanization. Colchicum (talk) 17:55, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

1. Unreferenced stubs???? Dear God have you even read the proposal? Is three links not adequate still? ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 17:54, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Voting is evil

1. EVIL!. I support this bot so long as the articles it creates are more than "such-and-such is a hamlet in Wherezistan" micro-stubs. --Carnildo (talk) 04:56, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
2. Indeed, Poles are quite evil. I support the proposal as is, but I would extra bonus support it if it were a more complex proposal in which it would gather was much data as possible for each country and work from there to create more complete articles. It would be more work, and extra code would need to be done for each source, and a new generic article would have to be created for each country, but it would contribute that much more to the encyclopedia (and it would probably get more people to support this). --Rory096 05:04, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
3. Don't trust polls (but don't trust bots either). Doczilla _STOMP! 05:14, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
4. Consensus was moving towards yes, until someone started a poll. ;-) --Kim Bruning (talk) 17:54, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Suggest tables with redirects

This is highly similar to a current discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Astronomical objects#Asteroid articles, and I'll suggest the same solution here as I've suggested there. Create lists of places, with tables containing the (frankly, quite sparse) amount of information that will be in these stubs and a redirect from the place name to the specific entry in a table in one of these list articles. If anyone ever cares to, the redirect can be replaced with an actual (non-stub) article, the place name exists in Wikipedia (as it should), and Wikipedia contains whatever data is known about the place (in tabular format, rather than as text in a stub). Short of spitting the delegates based on ... (sorry - wrong forum) - doesn't this solution address all concerns? -- Rick Block (talk) 04:42, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

The main difference is that 1. those asteroids are not notable for their own article 2.They can never be expanded since no further information exists about each asteroid. Every city can be expanded with more information, and I believe every city inherits notablity.(if it is a city and not just 3 people) Why not just have the articles there so people can add to it. But I do agree most of theses will stay stubs for a very long time. -- Coasttocoast (talk) 05:02, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

What is the essential difference between a redirect to a table entry that contains the information that would be in a stub, and having that information in a stub? -- Rick Block (talk) 05:13, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

To copy (and tweak) part of my comment in the mess above: Personally, I support lists as well. I'd rather have 30000 lists with a few dozen sections than 2 million stubs. If we make the lists exactly as the stubs: infobox, coordinates, and all, the only things we lose are things that would be exactly replicated over all the articles like the stub tags. Redirects can be created from the village name to the list and we lose nothing in terms of people searching for the information, but we retain pages like Special:Random as useful features. Once the list sections begin to expand, presumably at the same pace as the rest of the topics on Wikipedia, they can be split off into other articles and we still retain the list as an index. Mr.Z-man 06:06, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

This is not about abstract notability. We would all agree that Early life of Alexander the Great would be notable, but if the Alexander the Great article had only one line about his childhood, noone would think of spinning it off. I personally agree that all villages are notable, and should get full articles eventually. But, if there is a logical place to merge these village substubs (into the township articles), this should be done for now, until the content develops further.--Pharos (talk) 15:24, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

• This is the best idea. Create a list of these places, so that if there is indeed more information to be added on an location, it can be expanded. If this solution does not pass, I oppose the bot entirely, for reasons I have stated above. seresin ( ¡? ) 08:39, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

I concur with the list idea. The individual redirects can then be created into articles if an editor actually takes the time to create a half-decent stub/article out of it. I oppose the bot as it stands if this isn't the case, as I foresee an absolute nightmare as these articles are AfD'd, prodded, and CSD'd by the hundreds. That and we're doubling the size the encyclopedia with a bunch of micro-stubs, which certainly doesn't improve our image, or correlate with WP:NOT#INFO or WP:NOT#DIRECTORY. Sephiroth BCR ^(Converse) 08:47, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Support lists/tables with redirects I think making a separate stub for every tiny village would be overkill. I think the best solution would be to create lists at the 2nd-lowest level of the political hierarchy. That is, if a city is big enough to have multiple distinct wards/neighborhoods/boroughs with their own distinct names (and in this I do NOT mean numbered wards, e.g. Ward 6 or the like), then give the city its own article with the wards listed in it. If the city/town is not big enough to be divided like that, then it would not have its own article, but would be listed on the township/county/district page which contains that city/town.

So, to restate, here's my standard for notability of inhabited places: If an inhabited location is subdivided into distinct parts which are each named (not numbered) separately, then it is inherently notable and deserves its own article. If it is not, then it needs to meet one of the other notability criteria in order to be considered notable. Thoughts? --Aervanath's signature is boring 09:52, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

• Or, the bot could create the article as it desired, and then over-write it with the redirect to the list of townships, etc. This way, if someone ever comes along and says, Gee, we need an article, not a redirect, they just rollback the bot's second edit and work on the stubbed article. xenocidic (talk) 15:47, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Generate content dynamically - run bot on user requested page only

Oppose bot in current form By running this to create a bunch of static articles we would be using up our one shot at a unique opportunity. The creation of a new page is a unique opportunity - especially for a bot. Since bots can't understand what is there (except in a very limited sense), once we create a page it is hard for an automated system to improve it. So when somebody comes up with a new data source or a better bot design it will be much harder (or impossible) for them to use their elegant design to come up with better pages for these cities/towns. Instead of generating and storing these static pages, we should consider making the tool available (and accessible) so that somebody who wants to make a page on wherever can get a nice starter page to work on easily, but don't create them until somebody wants one. Much in the way that mediawiki handles links to outside datasources (DOIs, etc), automatically generating data like this should be handled through templates/linking in other data, rather than as static article text. Only make it static if you have to when somebody wants to edit it. (If must make it a static page, how about a single template that generates the page on the fly.)

• As bot and data sources evolve the user will get the best page that we can generate at that time. (Can integrate bug fixes, ideas for improvement, etc.)
• In the meantime it won't clutter up the random article selector, won't be as much of a target for vandals, etc.

Insert your favorite joke or quote about not having to deal with an installed base here.

Other issues:

• How does it handle disambiguation pages. 2 million new articles will mean a lot of extra disambiguation entries for some terms that people will have to sort through, and they won't know which bits are stubs.
• It doesn't seem to do a very good job of categorization. (Should do better.)
• At the very least, it should make it painfully easy for other bots to parse the whole article so somebody could come by later and improve things for the articles that people haven't edited. Zodon (talk) 09:11, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

I don't know how possible the dynamic-generation suggestion is, but I would support that if it's technically feasible. However, I think the bot-parsing and "what if we come up with a better format" objections are red herrings. The bot is going to make these pages in a standard format, and therefore any other bot can be programmed to come along, automatically parse that standard format, and re-format or update the article as needed.--Aervanath's signature is boring 10:06, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

• • Or, as I suggested above, the bot could create the articles, then redirect them to the list of townships. The user who came along wanting to create the article could just undo the last edit and be on their way. Of course, this would require that the user know this is possible. xenocidic (talk) 15:50, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Reading above, that "a bot sealed with approval and this discussion is several weeks too late", I don't wish to waste my breath. I don't even suppose that there will be a "notability" aspect incorporated in the bot: will it stop at the level of commune and not include what Italians call frazioni or hamlets? Doubtful, even if I thought it should. So Wikipedia is to be a gazetteer after all. I hope we can stop crowing over "three-millionth-article" etc. --17:32, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

List form

Why not have the bot generate lists of articles with the potential to be created, and allow those articles to be tagged by template for creation with the available data? That way, a human touch will be required, but the pre-made data and infobox available by bot would increase the convenience of creating the article. Nihiltres^{t.l} 17:57, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Reference Issue

I notice in the example that the bot claims to be using the National Geospacial Intelligence Agency as a reference. However, the reference is just a wikilink to that Wikipedia article. The bot needs to reference the actual page which the information was retrieved from, and NOT the NGIA wiki-article. The NGIA page (in this case) is here. If the NGIA wiki-link is necessary, put it in a See also section. Also, I notice that Maplandia.com is listed in the External Links section, and has exactly the same info on the linked page as the example article does. Is the bot retrieving info from Maplandia (which would by a copyright violation, or the NGIA? (Not that anyone would be able to tell, if it's exactly the same.)

If you will check some of the trial article additions from the bot's contribs, notice that the NGA GNS Search is being cited. Not ideal, but it seems acceptable. — Huntster (t • @ • c) 10:58, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

The bot extracts coordinates from National Geospacial Intelligence Agency which is public domain. Maplandia happens to be one of the most comprehensive sites on the web for places and satellite maps. This is why it is linked externally to help people. I happen to be a member of that site anyway. ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 12:25, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

As is mentioned at the top of this section, to comply with WP:V the reference link needs to go to the specific and detailed source not to a Wikipedia page. Additionally the citation should be correctly formated using a fully populated template (see User:Jeepday/Cite). If you are going to build 2 million articles they should be very well formated and referenced. Jeepday (talk) 13:12, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Which it will... ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 13:15, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

This is the point, BoS, the lack of evidence at the moment is fueling suspicion about this Bot and its aims doktorb _words^deeds 14:22, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Show me, I don't see an example. Jeepday (talk) 13:22, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Example: Kushgag. We dumped the example in favor of this. The FritzpollBot has already created 100 articles. I'm an Editorofthewiki^{[citation needed]} 15:06, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

How many databases?

I could get behind this if the bot used more than one source, say two or three different databases, and then only created stubs for the locations present in both/all databases searched. Using only one database, we run the risk of repeating typos and other errors in the original database. Only creating articles for places found in multiple databases would also increase the both "notability threshold" and the "verifiability threshold" for the articles created. In other words, the claim that "Aju is a village in Waingmaw Township in Myitkyina District in the Kachin State of north-eastern Burma" is more credible if Aju is listed in two or three databases rather than just one. —Angr 11:32, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Currently, I use maplandia to reference the NGIA database. If there is no match, it doesn't get written in and logs are then output for me to look at. Not many hits so far, and more to do with maplandia than anything else. More sources would be good (always good) as I say in my response at the top of the page Fritzpoll (talk) 11:39, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

What does that mean, though? Does Maplandia have its own database that's separate from NGIA? I'm talking about only creating articles for places that are in the logical conjunction of two or three different databases in the first place, not creating articles for all places in a single database and then going in after the fact with additional sources. —Angr 11:50, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Hello what is this?? Amurn etc etc etc ... created by the bot trial of 100 has ahem how many database links or references?... I count three. Perfectly adequate from notable sites. A google search shows tons of hits ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 12:20, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Well, good. Three different sources indicate it exists, so that's fine. But if the bot creates articles on places whose existence is confirmed by only one source, we could be getting into trouble. We don't Stephen Colbert's prediction of Wikiality to come true. —Angr 13:30, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

What's in a name?

One of the challenges of this project not mentioned so far is adherence to various language and/or country specific naming conventions. For example, WP:MON regulates naming for places in Mongolia. With places in multilingual countries, things will get even trickier. Are there procedures in place that will make sure no articles are created with non-conforming names? Or even worse, articles duplicated under slightly varying names? Only dealing with places in the US, Rambot didn't have to face this problem, so we don't have any related experience. With a goal of several million new stubs, this is a substantial risk, and if anything goes wrong, cleaning up the resulting mess later might amount to a gargantuan task. --Latebird (talk) 11:47, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Note that we are setting up an organization area as part of The missing encyclopedia articles group where eaxch country can be sorted and discussed with the relative wikiprojects before the bot is run for each country. I don't know why people keep assuming we'd be happy to just jump in there and not organize it first so we don't create a "huge mess". There is also the misconception that suddenly overnight we will be "plagued or flooded with two million articles". Not at all. Each country will be added gradually and discussed betwene human editors rather than unleashing an uncontrollable bot as is being implied ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 12:13, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Sorry for sighing here, but did you read the way the bot operates at the top of the page where I respond to these comments? The bot soes not just rip from a source and automatically create an article - it is checked by humans first. Please read the notice, and feel free to ask any questions Fritzpoll (talk) 12:12, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

I didn't assume anything. It's just that the issue wasn't mentioned anywhere before, so I considered it worth bringing it up. I wrote this question before your explanations were added, and posted it here right after the discussion was moved to a seperate page. After that, I noticed the new entry at the top, which does indeed give an (at least implicit) answer. Therefore, please direct your sigh at those who started this discussion without first preparing a document outlining all the relevant information. --Latebird (talk) 12:44, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Well, actually, you added the question 40 mins after that section had been added. My sigh was directed at those who haven't read the approvals page that was linked at the start of this discussion, which mentioned most of these points. Apologies if the tone seemed off, but I'm finding the need to repeat myself throughout the page quite tiring :) Fritzpoll (talk) 12:54, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

What Would Jimbo Do?

It was Jimbo, among others, who said we should move from a focus on quantity to a focus on quality... Perhaps his comments can focus this discussion and remind us what is most important. -- Rmrfstar (talk) 11:59, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Well ideally we'd like to have both. ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 12:10, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

And if we have quantity all of us users like Blofeld and myself can start focusing on quality of these article. Please, everybody, start reading about the bot proposal! I'm an Editorofthewiki^{[citation needed]} 13:37, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

The creation of many articles which may not be improvable beyond stub status is a move towards quantity. That having been said, automating article creation should certainly allow for a greater focus by editors on quality. I don't think that creating many, many one-line articles is useful if they cannot be improved beyond that point. Blofeld suggests this is not the case. I only appeal to Jimbo to gauge how we should best direct our efforts.-- Rmrfstar (talk) 14:37, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Jimbo said to focus on quality, not to cease making new articles. Obviously we're never going to be done working on either quality or quantity. What would Jimbo do? He'd let the bot go. Obviously if Wikipedia is going to be the sum total of all human knowledge and whatnot, we need to create these articles. Wrad (talk) 17:25, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Suggestion: Create preview of new page names

I believe this stub generation is generally a good idea. It might be useful to create a list of all page names that are proposed to be created by this bot. Users with local geographical knowledge, or experience with transliteration schemes, or other interest could review the list and offer suggestions for improvement if any are identified. --Ghewgill (talk) 12:37, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/Places and our manual system of chekcing - please please read about what the bot is doing and proposal first before leaving such questions. Everything is actually a lot more organized already than people think Thanks ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 12:50, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

(e/c)If you'd read the actual way the bot operates at the top of this page, you'd see that this has always been the plan, as has already been done, with special emphasis on human inclusion! The bot is too dumb to be able to do this automatically - it needs people! :) Fritzpoll (talk) 12:52, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Sample some of the bot's previous work

Maybe worth having a look at some of the recent pages the bot has created via the following link [2]. I had a quick look through a few articles at random, and they all seem to conform to the same standards. Lugnuts (talk) 13:56, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Limit by minimum population?

While I think this is a great tool that should be used, I think the concerns of those opposed are at least worth considering. Maybe I've missed it, but I haven't seen a response as to whether it would be feasible to limit new articles to those with a minimum population? I'm not totally aware of how big of a hole this is in wikipedia? Are there significant numbers of cities more than 50,000 people without an article? Larger cities and towns could be created first, and we wait and see what develops. After those are done we could decide whether to do everything smaller. That said, the bot could be set to create articles based on other criteria - do we have articles for all regions/counties? All regional/provincial capitals? If the process is going to take months anyway, and is going to require direct participation by editors anyway, it might as well be done in a more systematic way than simply starting with Afghanistan and finishing with Zimbabwe. - TheMightyQuill (talk) 15:18, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

This has been suggested a couple times above, but I agree that it's quite probably the best way of going about it. If the problem is that there's these places with large populations and no articles, do them first. Then trickle down to ones with less and less. Makes sense to ME anyway... ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 15:29, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

I don't think it's feasible. Getting reliable, up-to-date information about the population of towns and villages in all countries of the world is really, really difficult. —Angr 15:34, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

The population information doesn't have to be particularly accurate, as it doesn't have to be included in the article. ie. We don't need to know the exact population of a town, just whether it's bigger or smaller than, say, 50 thousand people.

I agree. Even if it is not a recent number, and even if it is not included (although I think it should be, even if it's a 1990 population estiumate), it is a good way to limit the spread of the articles. After all, an article about a city of 50,000 is much more likely to receive additional edits than a town of 1,000. Even if the threshold is later reduced, a population control seems to me to be the best way to get the project started while mitigating the concerns many editors seem to have. Newsboy85 (talk) 18:00, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Again, I'm not saying that smaller articles shouldn't be created eventually just that doing it in order makes more sense. To compare, I've never heard of a neighbourhood article (and there are a lot of them) being created when the related city article is still a stub. That doesn't mean all neighbouhood articles are non-notable and should be erased, but obviously cities are generally MORE notable than towns. If more people live there, more people must know about it.

Example

As it appears a lot of discussions are firing off up in the main body of this page, I thought I'd take a look at one of the examples citied by the "pro" lobby. Kushgag tells me that Kushgag is a small town in Afghanistan. There are very few pages on the net, it seems, that tells me anything more. This place is just a point on a map, it's not Leyland or Dublin or Cockermouth. There is nothing else to say about this otherwise (and hitherto) non-notable settlement. This is a permastub, and there's 1,999,999 permastubs to come. I'd say that fails WP:N, wouldn't you? And Angr says up at 15:34, getting up-to-date info about the population of towns and villages across the world is really difficult...Imagine trying to argue at AfD the notability of Kushgag... doktorb _words^deeds 15:37, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Villages are inherantly notable. The only reason there is nothing more to be written about this particular stub is that most Afghanis don't have computers and cannot create Websites or add info about their town from, say a local newspaper. I'm an Editorofthewiki^{[citation needed]} 15:56, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

No, you are looking at this from the wrong perspective. There is nothing to be written about this stub because there is nothing to write about. Kushgag is one of a total of 2 million potential permastubs. The ideal, I know, would be Kushgag to have a lot going on to write about. But it does not. It is not notable. It may not even be notable within Afghanistan! doktorb _words^deeds 16:00, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

I just took a note of this discussion because someone had the idea of making a link to it on every (?) editor's watchlist. doktorb, you did not get the initial point here. Any village in Afghanistan is about as notable as any village in the USA or somewhere else in the Western world. The only problem is that the people in Afghanistan usually don't have access to the Internet. This is some sort of structural bias in WP, with the result that some places receive less coverage than others. And I would be of the opinion that a stub is better than no article in these cases, although this might very well result in 2 million stubs. Zara1709 (talk) 16:33, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

The fact that consensus currently holds that villages are inherently notable keeps coming up. However, I would argue that the current consensus holds that villages which someone choses to write about are inherently notable. Supposedly, if a person creates an article on a village or city, even as a stub, it is because they have more information than just the geographic coordinates and a map. The idea that all villages are inherently notable, especially in light of this bot, needs to be challenged. I understand the need to counter systemic bias. What I fail to see is how a stub accomplishes this on the individual level. Yes, we will have two million of them. But does this actually make Wikipedia less biased? Or does it just provide an illusion of a decrease in bias? After all, most of the U.S. and U.K related articles are much longer, and they will remain that way. Newsboy85 (talk) 17:56, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Projects tags

If the bot is approved to create these articles, how difficult would it be to program it to add the appropriate country WikiProject tag to the talk page of the article? This would allow the country WikiProjects to more easily find the articles, I think. Most countries have these projects. ···日本穣^{? · Talk to Nihonjoe} 17:37, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Compromise: create another Wikimedia project for this?

Simply put, Wikipedia doesn't seem like the proper place for millions of stub articles on villages of dubious significance. Nonetheless, I think it's impossible to argue that the information isn't useful or relevant or interesting to someone. It just seems that Wikipedia isn't the right place for it. What about creating a WikiAtlas project that is intended to document every geographical location on Earth? It would be a good compromise - it would keep Wikipedia free of encyclopedia articles that are unlikely to be maintained, but it would still be a place where geographic information could be shared, accumulated, and improved. Of course, if a location attains encyclopedic importance/notability, an article on it could exist, but a new project seems like the best place for this information. - Chardish (talk) 17:42, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

That is just not the answer. Villages and cities are already inherently notable (see WP:notability). Wikipedia already has the responsibility to cover this and passing the buck is not a good idea. Wrad (talk) 17:49, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Another possibility

There is already wikimapia and such, and places can be encyclopedic, but a real possibility is a separate geographical wiki for small places. Reywas92^Talk 15:42, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Not a good idea. Villages are already inherently notable and we don't need a whole new project to cover what it is already wikipedia's mission to cover. Wrad (talk) 17:50, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Why the debate?

Why is this even being debated? BE BOLD and unleash that damn bot! Indeed, may many bots of its type follow! Observe what Wikipedia has achieved in seven years. Now take yourself forward another seven. The actions of this bot will be miniscule compared to what WP will be in 2015. Those who disagree fail to see the momentum this project has. Suicup (talk) 15:59, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Common outcomes#Places. I'm an Editorofthewiki^{[citation needed]} 16:01, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Again, why the debate? According to that link, there is no problem. Suicup (talk) 16:04, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Whilst technically feasible, given BAG approval and the fact that the bot has been flagged by a bureaucrat, the community is entitled to discussion to establish consensus for what is potentially a large change. My job is to keep clarifying issues surrounding the bot. Fritzpoll (talk) 16:06, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

The way I see it, WP Notability policy explicitly states that all villages and towns are notable. Thus, there is no problem with creating articles for all of them, whether bot or human created. Hence there is no problem with unleashing this bot. Arguments about how this will distort the size of WP, how having a million stubs is bad, we shouldn't conduct such large interventions etc etc are irrelevant to the issue at hand. As long as the current WP policy regarding notability remains, there is no reason why this bot can't proceed. Theoretically, these articles are going to be created eventually in the long run (because villages and towns are notable, so ipso facto they will eventually be written about on WP), so why does it matter if a bot creates them en masse right now? Unfortunately as we have seen here, you will never get agreement when people talk past each other and miss the entire point of the discussion. Hence this entire debate is pointless - proceed with the bot. Regards Suicup (talk) 16:37, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

I have two problems with that:

1. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Common outcomes#Places is not a WP Policy. Hence my suggestion to have an official policy stating bluntly something like "all places inhabited are notable".
2. The Bot would include not only town and villages, but possibly also hamlets. (please correct me if I am mistaken on this point). And I see nowhere that hamlets are inherently notable.

SyG (talk) 16:53, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

With regards to point one: this page, while still a proposal, meshes with the opinion of the AFD guidelines, and frankly it seems inevitable that the key point (that all villages/towns are notable) will be upheld. I'm not sure about the status of 'hamlets', you'd be best to take that up with the bot creator. Personally, I don't have a problem, and I'm sure the majority of others don't too. Regards Suicup (talk) 17:01, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

With regards to point one, thanks for the new page you pointed, it is good to see that an actual proposal is developping. I also noticed on its Talk page that a user (User:Carlossuarez46) proposed to put a clear statement like "all inhabited places are inherently notable" but that was not accepted by another user (User:Exit2DOS2000), although the reasons are a bit obscure to me. Why not pushing this proposal through before the bot is launched ? SyG (talk) 17:53, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Presumed notability

We cannot assume all places are notable because they exist and there's a passing mention of documentation. According to the general WP:Notability statement, "If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to be notable." With these examples, there is not significant coverage whatsoever. With the exact same argument there are significantly more references to individual people than any of these places. Surely elementary schools have move coverage than any of these places, but it was decided that they are not as notable. Retrospectively it was a bad idea to create the US articles a few years ago, and we cannot assume we are required to have articles on everything because of we did that in the past. Reywas92^Talk 15:54, 1 June 2008 (UTC) Yes and how many of those are American or British oriented. WOuld you please stop cluttering this page ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 16:57, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

An article on Alma High School (Alma, Arkansas) but not an article on a town with 60,000 in Bangladesh? Ahh but of course American wikipedia is for the shallow minded with little scope for widening coverage of the world. Virtually everything listed in that box proves my point completely. People think wikipedia is about America and the UK and popular culture. How many in that box are not related to this?? Pirates in popular culture? Dear God help us. This is exactly what needs to doing to rid of this outlook and start focusing on what is important, real world content. Basically you have just illustrated to me that your ideal goal is to have a afull article on a season of some baseball or NFL team rather than attempting to address the problem with ignoring 95% of the world land mass. That box looks to me like it has been drawn up by American teenagers. ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 17:01, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

WOuld you please stop cluttering this page? You have many more comments here, and I have the right to give my opinion. First, I said no to Alma High School, as it is now merged, as many other articles should be if it will be only one sentence. Please, I want thousands of articles on Bangladeshi towns with 60,000 people, just not two million villages with less than 1000 people, and that goes for the US and UK, too. Are you addressing me personally with the the American teenage part? I'm just pointing out that there are other things we can do than add two million stubs. Yes, they will be expanded eventually, but that's a lot of articles,a nd that would take many years. I don't want to ignore most of the world land mass, I just don't appreciate one-sentence articles. Reywas92^Talk 17:38, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

I get real tired of people telling me what I should read and write, and what I should care about and what I shouldn't. Yes, if 95% of the world's land mass is basically undocumented, then we shouldn't be creating articles that just include a pair of coordinates that amount to all we know about that part of the land mass. We're leaving 99.9% of the galaxy undocumented, instead of putting articles on every star in the galaxy in Wikipedia.

But hey, it's easy to attack the labor of people who are actually putting information in Wikipedia that they care about and that people want to read, based solely on their country and age. That'll teach them about bigotry in the real world, an important lesson.--Prosfilaes (talk) 17:31, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

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How 'bout some quality, not quantity.

This whole quality vs. quantity does not persuade me that this proposal should not go ahead. Lets assume (and I believe it is a relatively safe assumption) that many, if not most, of these articles will eventually get created by humans. Whether this is by residents of the towns/villages, following the global spread of the internet, or current wikipedians. Human created stubs do not always follow guidelines, have maps, suitable categories etc; they often require "fixing" i.e. they are not always of good quality. These bot created articles, in comparison will, follow the manual of style and overall be consistent. In my opinion they will be of higher quality than the equivalent human created stubs. If you disagree with the assumption that many of these stubs will eventually be created by humans I guess you are welcome to oppose this proposal! :) Suicidalhamster (talk) 17:04, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

The articles created by the bot will be created anyway guaratneed it would just takes years longer and done haphzardly without the consistency that a bot has (e.g sub stubs without an infobox and coordinates or details on provinces etc which take weeks to sort out human generated mess in). Articles can be quickly expanded in two minutes flat. There seems to be some idea that they will ALL never be expanded. IMagine how articles like Kushgag will look once proper information becomes available on the web. I fail to see how this doesn't have any benefit for the encyclopedia at all. For may place sinformation on population etc should be avialable ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 17:07, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

To Reywas92:-

Are you suggesting that the articles on Gladiators (British TV show) and Pirates in popular culture are more important than historic cities in the developing world? There is significant coverage, much of it however is not on the internet due to the infrastructural problems in the developing world. Much of the information that could expand these articles are still written on paper. Once these countries start computerising information to a larger extent (could be within a few years) then the expansion work can really start. Even with these problems there are missing articles on towns and cities that could be taken to GA or FA with the sources available, we are simply lacking manpower, and need more people to dedicate themselves to these sort of topics, instead of fancruft like Star Wars or some random cartoon. EJF (talk) 17:13, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Why should people write what you want them write? Isn't that slavery? Isn't this supposed to be a volunteer effort? Why is that articles that people read are less important than articles that no one has bothered to create yet?--Prosfilaes (talk) 17:27, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Please don't put a spin on my words. I am not forcing anyone to write anything, and to compare my point of view to a horrific crime against humanity is a nonsense. I am suggesting that perhaps articles about real places and real people are of more interest in an educational point of view (the Wikimedia Foundation being an educational charity) than an article on a random TV character. Imagine being Wikipedia's supposed target audience, "the child in Africa", who receives one of the $100 laptops - what would the child want to learn about our world? About its people and places, or a B-rate porn movie character? EJF (talk) 17:38, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

AfD nomination of Amurn

An article that you have been involved in editing, Amurn, has been listed for deletion. If you are interested in the deletion discussion, please participate by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Amurn. Thank you. Do you want to opt out of receiving this notice?

Devil's advocacy. JJB 17:25, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Lulz CWii_{(Talk|Contribs)} 17:59, 1 June 2008 (UTC)