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

Bot-created Wikipedia articles covered in the Wall Street Journal, push Cebuano over one million articles: The Swedish Wikipedia's prolific Lsjbot, which has created a significant proportion of the site's 1.7 million articles and has nearly single-handedly pushed it to being the fourth-largest Wikipedia, was covered in the Wall Street Journal this week. The newspaper reported that the bot has created 2.7 million articles, which is apparently a reference to the Waray-Waray and Cebuano Wikipedias, where Lsjbot is also active, and that "on a good day", it creates 10,000 articles.

News and notes

Bot-created Wikipedia articles covered in the Wall Street Journal, push Cebuano over one million articles

By The ed17

The Philippines has over 120 languages

The Swedish Wikipedia's prolific Lsjbot, which has created a significant proportion of the site's 1.7 million articles and has nearly single-handedly pushed it to being the fourth-largest Wikipedia, was covered in the Wall Street Journal this week.

In its front page article, the US newspaper reported that the bot has created 2.7 million articles, which is apparently a reference to the Waray-Waray and Cebuano Wikipedias (where Lsjbot is also active), and that "on a good day", it creates 10,000 articles.

The Wall Street Journal's article comes as the Cebuano Wikipedia is now the twelfth Wikipedia to cross the million article mark, almost entirely from the boost of these formulaic articles. Of these, over 40% (Swedish, Waray-Waray, Cebuano, Vietnamese, and Dutch) have received significant help from automated article creation scripts. The highest depth of these five is Vietnamese, with 18; Swedish follows with 11, and the others are all under ten. By comparison, the German Wikipedia has a depth of 90.

The process of bot-created articles has proved controversial among Wikimedians; by way of commenting, German Wikipedian Achim Raschka pointed the Signpost to an entry Denis Diderot wrote for the Encyclopédie, titled "Aguaxima". Diderot lamented that all they knew about the Aguaxima was that it was a plant in Brazil, yet he still had to describe it: "If all the same I mention this plant here, along with several others that are described just as poorly, then it is out of consideration for certain readers who prefer to find nothing in a dictionary article or even to find something stupid than to find no article at all."

Disagreement with these edits even led to a proposal last year that would have banned the overuse of bot-created articles on Wikimedia projects.

Still, they are not the first Wikipedias to utilize bots to augment human article creators: in 2007, Volapük and Lombard were expanded by over 100,000 bot articles each; Tagalog saw a similar rise. Lombard editors later placed a moratorium on new automated articles and deleted most of them; the Lombard Wikipedia currently has around 31,000 articles. Volapük is hovering around 120,000, and the Tagalog Wikipedia has close to 63,000.

Waray-Waray, Cebuano, and Tagalog are three of the largest languages of the Philippines. Volapük is a 19th-century constructed language from Germany, and Lombard is a Romance language from northern Italy. Vietnamese is primarily limited to Vietnam, while Dutch is spoken in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname.

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• Haifa students edit for credit: University students in Haifa, Israel, are writing Wikipedia articles for class credit, reports This Month in Education. The project stems from shortly after Wikimania 2011, when Wikimedia Israel and the University of Haifa launched a humanities project that would engage with Wikipedia. Since that time, 167 new articles have been added to the Hebrew Wikipedia, coming from students in classes on world history, archaeology, Hebrew literature, Middle Eastern history, Israeli history, and Jewish history.
• Printed books to disappear: PediaPress, who published book versions of Wikipedia articles for a fee, has informed the WMF that they will no longer offer this service. According to the WMF's deputy director Erik Möller, "[t]hey've sold about 15K books over that time period, not enough to break even, and the support/maintenance burden for the service is no longer worth it for them." The ability to download Wikipedia articles in PDF form will remain.
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• Wiki Loves Earth—Brazil: The conclusion of the Brazilian Wiki Loves Earth has seen nearly 7000 eligible images uploaded. More surprisingly, the contest, which cost the movement R$23,000, induced 895 individuals to create an account. The winners will be exhibited in Rio de Janeiro at an international photography event, Paraty em Foco, and published in Fotografe Melhor, which event organizer Rodrigo Padula says is a photo magazine that has the highest circulation in its genre in Brazil.
• Live tweeting politician's edits: There are two new Twitter accounts that automatically tweet the anonymous edits made from US Congressional and UK Parliamentary IP addresses: @congressedits and @parliamentedits. According to ArsTechnica, @congressedits has not caught any "scandalous" edits yet, but it did catch a staffer editing the Wikipedia page on horse head masks to include Barack Obama's handshake on 8 July.

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Printing

• While I recognize that the law has allowed companies to print and sell Wikipedia content, I am happy to see one of those businesses end. Beyond the fact that having a printed copy of Wikipedia content is pointless, the idea that someone is selling content that I created for free leaves a bad taste in my mouth. But don't fear, intrepid printing press, there's a sucker born every minute. Chris Troutman (talk) 21:20, 18 July 2014 (UTC)
  • I printed a copy of all the articles I have brought to GA as an example of what I have worked on. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 13:56, 19 July 2014 (UTC)
    • Wikipedia uses a CC-BY license, so it's legal to profit from Wikipedia articles. It's just a printing service, what's wrong with that? --NaBUru38 (talk) 18:16, 19 July 2014 (UTC)
      • Indeed. If you have a problem with someone potentially making money off content deliberately released without a commercial use restriction, you may want to find a different project. Ironholds (talk) 04:39, 20 July 2014 (UTC)
      • Of course, it looks like this company wasn't making much profit from the service, or they wouldn't be stopping it ;-) Anecdotally, many of the uses I've heard of have been "self-publishing" collections like Jim's. Andrew Gray (talk) 08:58, 20 July 2014 (UTC)
  • Wikipedia wasn't the only Wiki using the PediaPress service. For example, a printed travel guide from Wikivoyage might make a lot more sense than a printed set of encyclopedia articles. Powers ^T 21:01, 20 July 2014 (UTC)
    • To be fair, I believe Chris troutman was referring to companies like Books LLC or VDM Publishing, who suck up Wikipedia article, package them in a book, and print them whenever people shell out $55+ ... many of whom are not aware that they've just purchased something free to them on the Internet. "Do we now have to write in Amazon-books: “Attention! Books contains Wikipedia!”? --Alphascript Publishing. Having said that, it looks like Amazon and Google Books have pushed those types of books farther down in their search results. Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 05:06, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

Tweets from Congress

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

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

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

Bot-created articles

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

I started an en.wikipedia article on Lsjbot. --agr (talk) 18:48, 23 July 2014 (UTC)

Quite so. Off Wikipedia, there are what appear to be "click bait" sites that generate similar webpages from the US GNIS database. So you google for "Obscure Lake", and the webpage that pops up...is click bait that tells you that it's in such-and-such a topographic map quadrant, which you knew already. After a few times, one recognizes them and avoids them like the plague. I worry about the cumulative effect of training our readers to think that 99 times out of 100, our article at a particular scientific name will be a waste of their clicks. I think the potential damage to our reputation far outweighs the supposed ability of this approach to "nucleate" articles, which it doesn't seem to do at any perceptible rate.

What would make much more sense, although I doubt we have the technical means to do it at this time, would be the ability to create these on demand. When someone has a little bit of information or a picture of a species they want to add, they could trigger the bot, and it would spit out a stub for them to edit. That would be much more useful then filling small Wikipedias with grey goo. Choess (talk) 02:45, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

We do have this technical ability (or, at least, we're pretty close). There's a discussion here about how to do it from Wikidata; the results would be crude but probably good enough to tell you (in your local language) "this is a type of bat, it lives in Venezuela, here's a photo" on demand. Andrew Gray (talk) 21:08, 25 July 2014 (UTC)

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