Steve Summit <scs eskimo.com> writes in Message-ID:
<2008Jun02.0717.scs.0003eskimo.com>
> Mark Nilrad wrote:
>> Steve Summit <scseskimo.com> wrote:
>>> bobolozo wrote:
>>>> A small fishing village in Cambodia, or a
community of 100 people
>>>> in Kenya, may well have no internet access
at all, and if they
>>>> have it, they would not likely be visiting
the English wikipedia
>>>> as they wouldn't likely speak English.
>>>
>>> Hmm. By the same token, I guess we shouldn't
have articles
>>> on [[Troy], [[Pompeii]], [[Neolithic Europe]],
[[Xanadu]],
>>> [[Atlantis]], or [[Mars]].
>>
>> You're missing the point. I think anyone can agree
that Troy
>> and Pompeii have much more global significance than
X fishing
>> village, Cambodia.
>
> Um, no, you missed my point. Arguing about notability
or "global
> significance" is one thing. But it makes no sense
to bring up
> the question of whether the location of an article has
Internet
> access, or how many people there might speak English.
Hallelujah! Notability is a set of crufty guideline and no
more. "When
you wonder what should or should not be in [wikipedia], ask
yourself
what a reader would expect to find under the same heading in
an
*encyclopedia*."
Now I haven't seen a print Britannica in years, but as I
remember it
there were one (or more) gazetteer volumes, page after page
of places
with coordinates. If all the bot does is add 2 million
stubs, aka
gazetteer entries, that's fine. I'd expect a non-paper
encyclopedia to
have a bloody huge list of places, inhabited or otherwise
possibly of
use to readers. If 10% of them are expanded into
"proper" encyclopedia
articles, that's fine too, we're 200K real articles to the
better.
Yes, there are lots of questions to answer about data
quality and
implementation details, but as far as I can see, this is a
win, win
deal. Creating even gazetteer-quality geostubs from scratch
is quite
time consuming. Even translating place stubs from another
language is
not all that simple thanks to all the template discrepancies
and the
fact that administrative district X has a different name.
Let a bot do
the scut work. That's what they are for.
Angus
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