FritzpollBot was recently approved to create stub articles on English Wikipedia for most or all of the documented villages and towns in the world. (Example.)
In 2003, Rambot created placename articles for every census location in the United States. We were therefore able to claim complete coverage (per that “encyclo-” prefix) of one country. FritzpollBot aims to complete this coverage for the entire world.
I think this bot-assisted programme of article creation is a Good Thing for topics where we do in fact have the data. It’ll certainly help alleviate our systemic bias. The issues I can see are editorial — the Rambot articles are data in prose form that these days we’d do with a parameterised template, etc. — but Fritzpoll is quite aware of these and the planned programme includes considerable human review and the active involvement of country WikiProjects. Good.
(May I note that people whose objections are that this will artificially inflate the article count or make Special:Random annoying appear to have forgotten that we’re here to write an encyclopedia.)
The question that springs to mind is: what else can we get complete data on for bot-assisted article creation? Every state-level or higher politician in every country ever? What else?
Update: Fritzpoll is proceeding with all due caution, and the bot will be doing nothing but preparing lists as yet. See evolving FAQ.
One thought on “To cover the world.”