<story><title>The second largest version of Wikipedia is written mostly by one bot</title><url>https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/4agamm/the-worlds-second-largest-wikipedia-is-written-almost-entirely-by-one-bot</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>4cao</author><text>This endeavor looks largely orthogonal to what the objectives of an online encyclopedia should be. Creating as many stub articles as possible and filling them with &amp;quot;formulaic, generic, and reusable templated sentences with spots for specific information&amp;quot; seems more like a recipe for an automated content farm than for &amp;quot;disseminating the sum of &lt;i&gt;human&lt;/i&gt; knowledge.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;It would be most interesting to know what the 148 active Cebuano Wikipedia users think of the 5,331,028 articles the bot created, ostensibly for them. Too bad nobody apparently cared to ask.&lt;p&gt;In particular, since Cebuano speakers are likely to be fluent in Tagalog and&amp;#x2F;or English as well, they can easily use one of the other Wikipedia editions too. Without the hyperactive bot, the much smaller Cebuano Wikipedia would arguably be more relevant, reflecting topics truly of interest to the community.&lt;p&gt;While the number of articles is a convenient way of comparing Wikipedia language editions, it only works as such to the extent that the articles are kept to a certain standard. It seems to me that what we are observing here is yet another example of the situation that when a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure.</text></comment>
<story><title>The second largest version of Wikipedia is written mostly by one bot</title><url>https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/4agamm/the-worlds-second-largest-wikipedia-is-written-almost-entirely-by-one-bot</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sings</author><text>I always thought it was a bit bizarre that different language editions of Wikipedia  contain different information. It seems the focus should be more on translation than content creation. Maybe that isn’t practical with the current structure, but surely the aim should be a definitive knowledge graph rather than a disparate and unevenly duplicated set of articles. Just my two cents – I am sure many have put a lot of thought into how to best tackle this.</text></comment>