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[1673] Of a bot wants to create two million pages on Wikipedia

This must be one of the craziest ideas ever tabled in Wikipedia.

User:FritzpollBot was recently approved at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/FritzpollBot to create stub articles for most or all of the documented villages and towns in the world in the style of User:Fritzpoll/GeoBot/Example. The BRFA means that it is approved technically, Tim Starling has confirmed that there will be no adverse technical effects from such a bot, but I don’t believe that this is a non-controversial task, so I’m bringing this here for wider review by the community. The following are some pros and cons of the bot, though not an exclusive list:

Pros

  1. Articles about verifiable towns are generally considered inherently notable
  2. This will greatly increase Wikipedia’s coverage of geographical places
  3. The articles will be very standardized, all will have coordinates and an infobox
  4. A new user wishing to write about one of these places won’t have to figure out how to start a new article (the infoboxes for places can be complicated)

Cons

  1. Many people would rather not have stub articles, this would create close to 2 million new stubs, many of which may not be able to be expanded much more than their original size
  2. There could be adverse effects with pages like Special:Random and the search function
  3. Adding new articles like this could be seen as “inflating our article count”
  4. The “inherent notability” for geographical places may not apply for very obscure villages.

Options

  1. Implement bot as written, create ~2 million new village articles
  2. Modify bot to only create article on large villages, X thousands new village articles (this is being done anyway 2 million is far from covering every place and google only recognizes the main towns and villages)
  3. Modify bot to create lists of all villages, X thousands new list articles
  4. Modify bot to create merged mini-articles for all villages on articles about townships, X thousands new and expanded township articles
  5. Do not implement bot

One vote for Option 5 please!

By Hafiz Noor Shams

For more about me, please read this.

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