<story><title>In Sweden, Sverker Johansson and His &apos;Bot&apos; Have Created 2.7M Wikipedia Articles</title><url>http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/for-this-author-10-000-wikipedia-articles-is-a-good-days-work-1405305001-lMyQjAxMTA0MDEwMzExNDMyWj</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dkhar</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m not very in-tune with Wikipedia&amp;#x27;s culture (which, I&amp;#x27;ve read, is very nuanced and rigid[1]), but I really don&amp;#x27;t see why this is a bad thing, given the information in the articles is accurate (and the article gives the impression that glitches are rare).&lt;p&gt;If nobody else was going to create an article about some species of butterfly, I don&amp;#x27;t see why adding that information would be harmful to Wikipedia. Does it make Wikipedia harder to read? Harder to search?&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think &amp;quot;it&amp;#x27;s not written by a human&amp;quot; is a valid argument for factual information, and I&amp;#x27;ve never seen any evidence to suggest that it should be one.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I found this bot&amp;#x27;s edit log! &lt;a href=&quot;https://sv.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Logg/Lsjbot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;sv.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;w&amp;#x2F;index.php?title=Special:Logg&amp;#x2F;Lsjb...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Here are a few articles randomly picked out of the latest 1000:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urochloa_plantaginea&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;sv.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Urochloa_plantaginea&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brachiaria_vittata&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;sv.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Brachiaria_vittata&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutriana_repens&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;sv.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Eutriana_repens&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andropogon_decipiens&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;sv.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Andropogon_decipiens&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;After looking at these, I&amp;#x27;m beginning to see why there is some backlash. There are literally thousands of articles here that read &amp;quot;X is a species of grass. It got its name from Y and is described in Z catalog.&amp;quot; The only people who would need this information are botanists, and they already have their own specialized sources. I&amp;#x27;m still not against bot-produced content, but I understand why some people oppose initiatives like this.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gwern.net/In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.gwern.net&amp;#x2F;In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gwern</author><text>At least part of the problem is that he&amp;#x27;s generating what one might call &amp;#x27;info trash&amp;#x27;: he&amp;#x27;s taking highly structured information from databases, and turning it into natural-language prose, a data source of less value since it&amp;#x27;s less structured.&lt;p&gt;These prose versions are now going to steadily fall out of sync with the original databases, be much more prominent in Wikipedia and Google, diverge from each other, be harder to parse and perform any complex analysis on (a database is at least relatively comprehensible, but to parse his dumps you have to hope you can reverse-engineer it, no other bots or editors have modified it much, and that he didn&amp;#x27;t get clever with his format strings), etc. If at some point one wanted to change something about the presentation, it&amp;#x27;s no longer a matter of editing one template and now the user-friendly HTML view onto the database is automatically updated for all viewers, now one has to run a carefully-written bot on millions of articles (and since that is beyond semi-automated bots, you have to have special permission to run it).&lt;p&gt;It would have been better to work on merging databases or exporting them into a structured site, something like Freebase.</text></comment>
<story><title>In Sweden, Sverker Johansson and His &apos;Bot&apos; Have Created 2.7M Wikipedia Articles</title><url>http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/for-this-author-10-000-wikipedia-articles-is-a-good-days-work-1405305001-lMyQjAxMTA0MDEwMzExNDMyWj</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dkhar</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m not very in-tune with Wikipedia&amp;#x27;s culture (which, I&amp;#x27;ve read, is very nuanced and rigid[1]), but I really don&amp;#x27;t see why this is a bad thing, given the information in the articles is accurate (and the article gives the impression that glitches are rare).&lt;p&gt;If nobody else was going to create an article about some species of butterfly, I don&amp;#x27;t see why adding that information would be harmful to Wikipedia. Does it make Wikipedia harder to read? Harder to search?&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think &amp;quot;it&amp;#x27;s not written by a human&amp;quot; is a valid argument for factual information, and I&amp;#x27;ve never seen any evidence to suggest that it should be one.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I found this bot&amp;#x27;s edit log! &lt;a href=&quot;https://sv.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Logg/Lsjbot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;sv.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;w&amp;#x2F;index.php?title=Special:Logg&amp;#x2F;Lsjb...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Here are a few articles randomly picked out of the latest 1000:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urochloa_plantaginea&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;sv.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Urochloa_plantaginea&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brachiaria_vittata&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;sv.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Brachiaria_vittata&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutriana_repens&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;sv.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Eutriana_repens&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andropogon_decipiens&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;sv.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Andropogon_decipiens&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;After looking at these, I&amp;#x27;m beginning to see why there is some backlash. There are literally thousands of articles here that read &amp;quot;X is a species of grass. It got its name from Y and is described in Z catalog.&amp;quot; The only people who would need this information are botanists, and they already have their own specialized sources. I&amp;#x27;m still not against bot-produced content, but I understand why some people oppose initiatives like this.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gwern.net/In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.gwern.net&amp;#x2F;In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>boomlinde</author><text>&amp;gt; The only people who would need this information are botanists&lt;p&gt;I think that looking up plant species are exactly the kind of thing people would want to use an encyclopedia for.</text></comment>