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Comment by asgard1024 | Hacker News Reader

This article poses a real question whether computer generated articles are suitable for encyclopedia consumed by humans.

Speaking of this, I would love to see Wikipedia in machine-readable language. Something like CYC project.

Edit: I know of WikiData, but there should be an unstructured analog to that.

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As long as the content of those articles is relevant and accurate, I don't see how that would impact on the suitability of the articles in question.

Does it really matter if a bot or a human has created an article as long as it contains facts and not thorough analysis?

Disclaimer: I haven't read any of the bot generated articles (at least, I don't think so).

I agree with your point. It's generally better to have some article that no article. But Wikipedia is also supposed to be readable by humans, to provide insight and understanding. I am not sure that mere formatted collection of data, as opposed to a real article, does that. And I believe there are many Wikipedia editors who feel the same.

Though, wouldn't it be more efficient to put the data into some machine readable form, if they were already processed by the machines anyway? This would then allow anybody to create algorithm to extract information (meaning) from the data.

So I think there are also good reasons to keep the human and machine created articles separate.

It's not so much a formatted collection of data as it is like an excerpt from an encyclopedia. It's sparse and the articles are pretty similar to each other but it has proper sources, and someone might actually find the information useful. And it could serve as a starting point to improve by some enterprising Swedish biologist.

If you want to read any of the bot generated articles, just try http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Slumpsida

I tried it 10 times and got 6 bot articles.

You're better off reading the English version rather than the poorly translated Swedish one imo.

If I understand the articles correctly, these are not Wikipedia entries that were translated from English into Swedish. These are entries created for the Swedish Wikipedia from original source material written in Swedish. The article mentions plans for creating articles for authors that do not have entries in the English Wikipedia. This means that the Swedish Wikipedia has a large number of entries on topics that do not have entries in the English Wikipedia. And will have even more in the future.

It's something like this: https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lepechiniella_persica. Basically, if you click "Random article" (https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Slumpsida) you have a about a 50/50 chance of hitting an article by the bot.

Some of them even have pictures but most are pretty sparse. In my opinion, it's not that bad to have these articles but they should be improved.

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