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

Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Series/Bot-created articles

Printing[edit]

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)[reply]
- 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)[reply]
  - 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)[reply]
    - 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)[reply]
    - 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)[reply]
- 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)[reply]
  - 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)[reply]

Tweets from Congress[edit]

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

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

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

Bot-created articles[edit]

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 These articles are not maintained by anyone and gradually rot into outdated cruft.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

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

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

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

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