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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Niteowlneils (talk | contribs) at 22:38, 17 August 2004. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Every article for which Rambot made the last significant edit.

  • Delete. --Eequor 18:40, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
  • Keep. Angela. 18:57, Aug 17, 2004 (UTC)
  • Keep. Eugene van der Pijll 19:11, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
  • Keep. Rhymeless 19:13, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
  • Keep. Mindspillage 19:58, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
  • Keep. See LaGrange, Illinois (not to brag) for a good example of what Rambot can become. It's not a great article, but it's much better than what would be there if users were working on their own. [[User:Meelar|Meelar (talk)]] 20:07, 2004 Aug 17 (UTC)
  • Keep. [[User:Bkonrad|older≠wiser]] 20:13, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
  • Keep. --Michael Snow 22:12, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
  • Keep, absolutely. Good starting points. Latest round has been adding state maps showing the location of the county which I think is a very good thing. Niteowlneils 22:21, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
  • Keep, of course. They are encyclopedic, and thousands have been significantly expanded, more are each week. -- Infrogmation 22:25, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Every boilerplate talk page created by Rambot. (see Talk:Point_MacKenzie,_Alaska)

  • Delete. --Eequor 18:40, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
  • Keep. Angela. 18:57, Aug 17, 2004 (UTC)
  • Don't care. Eugene van der Pijll 19:11, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
  • Keep. Rhymeless 19:13, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
  • Delete [[User:Supadawg|supadawg - Talk]] 19:52, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
  • Keep. [[User:Bkonrad|older≠wiser]] 20:13, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
  • Keep. --Michael Snow 22:12, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
  • Can you provide example(s) other than User talk:Rambot--I don't see any other Talk pages in the first 500 contributions, and I don't want to have to scroll thru 40-50,000 edits to find something that I'm not sure exists. If no example, the default Keep. Niteowlneils 22:21, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Every article about a place with fewer than 1111 inhabitants. If you would prefer a limit other than 1111, please mention so.

  • Delete. --Eequor 18:40, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
  • Keep. Angela. 18:57, Aug 17, 2004 (UTC)
  • Keep. Eugene van der Pijll 19:11, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
  • Keep. Rhymeless 19:13, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
  • Delete. [[User:Supadawg|supadawg - Talk]] 19:52, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
  • Keep. Mindspillage 19:58, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
  • Keep. [[User:Bkonrad|older≠wiser]] 20:13, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
  • Why 1111? Keep. --Michael Snow 22:12, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
  • Keep. Niteowlneils 22:21, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC) Hard to believe we're having this discussion again.
Also, WAY too arbitrary--size is just one of many factors that determine the notability of a given community. Location, geography, battles and other historical events, famous people born there, things invented there, locations of particularly notable crimes are just a few of the examples I can think of. Niteowlneils 22:38, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
  • Keep. Population is not a definitive indicator of notworthyness of a location. -- Infrogmation 22:25, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Permanently ban User:Rambot and any variant of its script
Support
  1. Eequor
  2. [[User:Supadawg|supadawg - Talk]]
Oppose
  1. Schnee (Feel free to rewrite all Rambot-created articles with better versions, but as long as we don't have anything better, keep them and be thankful that there is *some* information on these places etc. at least.)
  2. This is idiocy. The city/town/village entries are slowly being worked on, and if you have a problem on them as you find them, here's a neat idea: go to google, and look up the town, even the titchiest little town usually is listed on county pages with historical information, etc. Rhymeless 18:56, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
  3. Angela. VfD is not a place to vote for bans. 18:57, Aug 17, 2004 (UTC)
  4. Ferkelparade π 19:03, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC) - As Schneelocke said, it's better to have the rambot articles than to have nothing at all, and some of them have already started to grow beyond mere rambotness.
  5. Eugene van der Pijll 19:11, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC) - The articles consist of a bit of (some would say "almost useless") information, but they can function as a starting point for a useful article; most won't, but those don't actually hurt anyone.
  6. Mindspillage 19:58, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC) - Disk space is cheap, and they're good starting points. I think the presence of these articles makes it more likely that future contributors will come and flesh them out, instead of deciding they aren't up to the task of starting a new article from scratch themselves.
  7. Don't ban Rambot--for example, the articles around my hometown are quite interesting to me, and I've learned interesting things from them. I'd encourage more Wikipedians to go and add details about their places of residence; I only wish the same info was available for other nations. [[User:Meelar|Meelar (talk)]] 20:11, 2004 Aug 17 (UTC)
  8. [[User:Bkonrad|older≠wiser]] 20:13, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
  9. Just because factual information can also be obtained elsewhere is not a good reason for us not to have it. Otherwise, the arguments for deletion are really criticisms of Census Bureau methodology. These can be dealt with on pages about the census itself. --Michael Snow 22:12, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
  10. Niteowlneils 22:21, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC) - Agree most with Angela, second Meelar, but agree with all other comments against a ban, plus ditto on my comment that the new maps are good, and other good things can be added with this bot; nearest airport, official city/county web sites, maybe elevation or area code--there's all kinds of possibilities. Mindspillage also adds a very good point that I don't remember being specifically raised before. Also, since there are many named communities not covered by the census data, and I have done a lot of new pages patrol, I can testify that what comes in if there is no Rambot article is typically "<name of user's hometown> has a store and a post office. There's a river nearby.", and usually mentions the state and/or county, and those are the good ones--often its more like "Green Valley is the best city in the state". Either of those are FAR worse than the bot-created articles.
Comments

Why should anyone be thankful for them? All their information can be easily obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau. --Eequor 18:55, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)

    • In my experience, much of this info is FAR from easy to get in a readable format from census.gov. Also, it's hard to get all the info at once for a location--you have to do separate searches for geography vs population, etc. Niteowlneils 22:21, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
This has been discussed before at User talk:Rambot/Delete. Angela. 18:57, Aug 17, 2004 (UTC)
  • The "Ban Rambot" section is entirely inappopriate for Vfd and should be removed from this page. -- Infrogmation 22:25, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)

La Grange, Illinois is entirely unconvincing as an argument for the usefulness of Rambot. The first three sections, including the lead, are nearly unmodified from the time the bot created the article (December 11, 200). Only two sentences have been added, while the first has been slightly expanded. The ethnicity links have also been updated. The rest of the article is completely unrelated to any of the preceding sections, and probably of much more interest to readers. I would hope that Wikipedians can write articles regardless of whether a script has generated some text that nobody refers to in later articles. See Wikipedia:Integrate changes.

Really, this is two separate articles which nobody has thought to merge. It isn't in news style or summary style. I think this argues more strongly that there is no need for the Rambot articles, and that they degrade the quality of Wikipedia. Instead of writing one complete and well-formatted article, inertia has encouraged editors to leave the badly-written parts alone. Starting from scratch, a human would have written the article in a properly layed-out manner, presenting the information according to its relevance to the reader.

Try this: delete everything in La Grange, Illinois above the Government section. I'm certain that somebody who already has interest in the article could do a far better job of rewriting it than a script ever could. --Eequor 22:15, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)

1111

Any reasonably small limit could be used. Mostly I picked this number because:

  1. it's close to 1000
  2. it isn't a multiple of 10
  3. it appears more arbitrary

--Eequor 22:34, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)

More evidence that Rambot is evil
  • Most of its articles have irrelevant statistics, including percentages less than 1% and mentions of 0%.
  • All are poorly wikified (inconsistent, redundant, unintuitive), particularly with regard to ethnicity.
  • All are under-wikified. Except for the lead section, links within the article are limited to the following:
County articles also list cities/towns/villages contained with, also a good aggregation of info and good linkage. See Roscommon County, Michigan, for example. Niteowlneils 22:21, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
This has been debated in a number of forums, as different states use different ways to distinguish population areas. EG Some have formal defintions of "village" and "town", but many don't. I've also specifically seen Wikipedians enter strong objections to calling everything a "city". Niteowlneils 22:21, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
  • Most of the statistics would be better presented by a table. Perhaps a link to the Census Bureau would suffice?
Tables generally get added once the article gets long enuf that the table won't overwhelm it. See Seattle, Washington, or most any of the large cities in the US. Niteowlneils 22:21, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Evidence that bots are evil
  • Both Template namespace initialisation script and Guanabot have presumably made corrections to every article created by Rambot -- and so there are extremely few articles where Rambot is automatically marked as making the last edit.
  • The evilness of bots is not a topic for VfD. Angela. 18:57, Aug 17, 2004 (UTC)
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