Association Of Those Who Think Bot-Created Stubs Are An Acceptable Way To Add Information To A Wikipedia

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I, Smeira, on Saturday, October 27th, 2007, hereby create the the Association Of Those Who Think Bot-Created Stubs Are An Acceptable Way To Add Information To A Wikipedia (AOTWTBCSAAAWTAITAW, or Pro-Bot-Choice for short).


Our motto: Veritas non habet patrem (Truth hath no father).


We understand that there is opposition to this view, and we think that it stems ultimately from an essentialist prejudice which can and should be debated -- see next section.

Members[edit]

Supporters[edit]

  • HappyDog believes that the policy on whether bot-created articles/stubs are acceptable or not should be consistent across all Wikipedias, and that existing precedents imply that they are currently considered to be acceptable by a great many projects. If it is subsequently decided that they are unacceptable then this should be a global policy, and bot-created articles/stubs should be deleted from all Wikipedias.

Debate Forum[edit]

Feel free, all of you, to start discussing this topic here. To start, here is a list of our basic arguments:

  • A stub is a stub is a stub. If it's correct, it doesn't matter whether or not it was created by a human. If one admits stubs are, all in all, a good thing, it is better to think of ways to judge them rather than where they come from.
  • Bots don't exclude humans. We firmly believe a community of human editors is the basis sine qua non of any Wikipedia. We further think that the fact a stub was created by a bot does not preclude the further editing by humans. Stubs -- bot-created or not -- all have the same chance of being further developed into excellent articles by human editors.
  • Some kinds of information (obvious example: statistical information in infoboxes, e.g. for towns and villages) are better added by bots. If your source is correct (e.g. a central site with statistics; a reliable table with the information; etc.), humans will probably make more mistakes while copying the information to articles than bots.

Compare with other associations[edit]