Wikipedia talk:Articles for deletion/User:Rambot

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Permanently ban User:Rambot and any variant of its script[edit]
Support[edit]
  1. Eequor
  2. [[User:Supadawg|supadawg - Talk]]
Oppose[edit]
  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. 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 (and Finlay and Geogre), 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.
    Also, without the rambot template to provide a guide to the standard Wikipedia "voice", people make rambling essays like this[1]. Niteowlneils 23:10, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
  11. I'd rather ban Eequor. RickK 22:52, Aug 17, 2004 (UTC)
    All's I've done is bring these horrible articles back into the community's attention. --Eequor 23:07, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
  12. Finlay McWalter | Talk 22:54, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC) Note that a) VfD is not the forum for bans b) the rambot/ramman issue has been discussed innumerable times c) bans are for seriously deleterious users, not ones with which we may disagree. In the longer term, census data (and other autmatically entered info) will ideally be added by transclusion rather than a bot (appearing as immutable styled blocks, not wikitext), but in the continued absence of said transcludor, ram-man must suffice.
  13. Oppose. - Mustafaa 23:20, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
  14. Inappropriate to even think of having a vote on ban/keep here. Geogre 23:43, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
    Not only is this the wrong place, but rambot hasn't even been used for over a year, so why bother? Niteowlneils 00:59, 18 Aug 2004 (UTC)
  15. This is not only the wrong place, but also wrong in general Chris 73 | Talk 00:16, 18 Aug 2004 (UTC)
  16. Andrewa 03:33, 18 Aug 2004 (UTC)
  17. I don't like rambot. I think the information it provides is largely useless. Worse, the format is terrible and people tend to just leave it as is as the article grows up. But, I don't think this means we should ban rambot. Rather, we should fix it and make it better. In my opinion, this means getting rid of the demographic information. At the city level keep just the population estimate, latitude and longitude, and area/water area (if this part is accurate, I've found the water area part to be quite inaccurate). What we're left with might be too small of a stub. If so then maybe we can combine it into a single page per county or other divisional area and leave links to the individual pages. But I don't really have a problem with a page per city, with just that basic information I've described above. anthony (see warning) 21:47, 23 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Comments[edit]

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)
    • Exceptional abuses require exceptional measures. Is there a page you would consider more appropriate? I felt it would be more convenient to have everything related to the Rambot articles on one page, where all of it can be easily tracked. Besides, it's not like I'm suggesting banning User:Ram-Man. --Eequor 22:44, 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.

The point is that I wouldn't have bothered to write any my contributions, and probably many other users wouldn't either, if Rambot hadn't given me a starting point and some organization. [[User:Meelar|Meelar (talk)]] 23:32, 2004 Aug 17 (UTC)
  • So what? Is there a rule that if an article isn't changed in X period of time it should be deleted? I think not. RickK 22:52, Aug 17, 2004 (UTC)
Well... yes. See Wikipedia:Votes for deletion, Wikipedia:Candidates for speedy deletion, Wikipedia:Deletion policy#Lag times, and Wikipedia:Deletion log. --Eequor 23:13, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I don't see a single point in any of those pages which says that a page is eligible for deletion because it hasn't been edited for a while. RickK 04:23, Aug 19, 2004 (UTC)

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[edit]

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[edit]
  • 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.
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)
    • Absolutely not. In New York State, and possibly other states, "town", "village" and "city" are clearly defined types of municipalities. To replace "town" or "village" with "city" is incorrect. What Rambot did screw up in N.Y. is to label CDPs as "towns". I had to manually adjust most of these in Westchester County, hoping people will hit the other counties.[[User:Nricardo|--Nelson Ricardo >>Talk<<]] 10:07, Sep 25, 2004 (UTC)
      • I think it's important that these terms are linked to articles explaining their specific and clearly defined meanings, particularly if they differ from state to state. Those of us in the rest of the world get confused when we see villages of tens of thousands of people, or cities of hardly anyone. Outside the USA, a village is a small settlement, a town is a medium-sized one, and a city is a big one. If someone asked me to think of a city in England I might name somewhere big like Leeds or Bristol, both of which have populations in the hundreds of thousands. I suspect the same question to an American might yield the name of just about any urban area. Links to articles defining the terms would be a big help to the other 6 billion of us. — Trilobite (Talk) 12:45, 25 Sep 2004 (UTC)
        • Well, that looks like a job for rambot (though I might have a crack at wikilinking the municipalities in Westchester County):-) To get you started, please see Political subdivisions of New York State. I've just added the 3rd paragraph which I hope will make the situation on N.Y. clearer. Note that terminology varies in other states. (If you are truly bored, you can puruse the 250+ pages of the local govt. handbook, linked at the end of that article.)[[User:Nricardo|--Nelson Ricardo >>Talk<<]] 19:26, Sep 25, 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)
That's an excellent article. The material by Rambot is hardly visible. Even so, the quality of the article takes an abrupt plunge at Seattle, Washington#Demographics, returning to normal immediately after. It's very strange that nobody has edited the Rambot sections, when every other part of the article has been rewritten. Is the bot really a better editor than every real user? --Eequor 23:00, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Evidence that bots are evil[edit]
  • 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)

What ...?[edit]

It seems meaninglessless to dump this on VfD's lap without explanation (especially without signing the "nominations"). Plowing through all the comments, I'm starting to pick up gleams of light, and hints that Eequor probably posted it. Eequor, how about at least a few lines of general introduction? The cause being promoted may be very good, for all I know, but what's the point of "bringing something back into the community's attention" without bringing it to their understanding? And "back"? There are new users here, as well as people who've heard it all before. Bishonen 00:03, 18 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Sorry for the confusion. I did start this; my main complaints are written above. Most of the articles created by Rambot seem to be of little use to anyone besides a statistician. Does anybody really care that a particular ethnic group forms .05% of the population? Is it sensible to have a number of articles about towns with no current residents? Do blocks of random numbers that nobody ever looks at belong in the middle of actual prose? How will any of the articles be updated after the next census is completed?
I'm surprised that Rambot has so much support despite persistent complaints about it, and considering that very little good is said about what the script produces. From the examples that have been provided, I don't see how they can be thought of as "stepping stones", places to start from. That I've seen, real articles have nothing in common with the Rambot stubs, aside from being about the same place. Article histories show that contributors mostly just forget the Rambot stuff is even there. --Eequor 00:45, 18 Aug 2004 (UTC)

It's odd to see people so worked up about this. There are only 40,000 of the articles, and they shouldn't all be deleted. Just most of them. There are always exceptions. It's not like somebody's going to delete 30,000 articles overnight.

Odder still are the objections to the poll itself which are expressed by voting in the poll rather than just leaving a comment below. How much sense does it make for somebody to make complaints about "breaking protocols" by breaking an implicit protocol themselves?

If this isn't the right place for discussions such as above, there ought to be a more visible forum where controversial subjects might be discussed with fairness and civility, without raising complaints about violating protocols. --Eequor 01:36, 18 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Well, if it makes any difference, I kind of like Rambot's work. We all complain about it, just like everyone complains about "the government" once or twice, but most of us know that we want Rambot around, and the government. We can all be irritated by hitting the random page and seeing an article on a town of 5 in Montana, but I also think that what we would get from user authorship of home towns would be considerably worse. Also, Rambot's brainless (literally) entries do set a tone for new users: neutral means neutral point of view. We have enough trouble reverting edits and edits on political and nationalist topics. Imagine what would happen if the kidiwikis began writing hoax and prank articles on each others' local town rivalries. (Many of the town entries for Australia and other non-US areas are either very hotly debated or possibly hoaxes.) Finally, Rambot's towns may have a population of 1,110 now, but that doesn't mean that it was ever thus. The town may have been a vital rail center that figures in Civil War history and has now been killed by WalMart in the next town and the interstate two towns over. Making an assumption that a real town is unworthy because of its population ignores the value of town entries for people not looking to determine voting districts. Anyway, that's my little cheer for Rambot. Geogre 12:56, 18 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Arbitration[edit]

I'm confused. Isn't Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/User:Rambot an even less appropriate place for this poll? There doesn't seem to be any interest in the proposal. --Eequor 23:18, 18 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I'm not sure, but I think Rossami moved it there by accident when sie was splitting the vote into two chunks. If that's the case, there's no harm in someone speedy-deleting the redirect left lying there. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 23:27, 18 Aug 2004 (UTC)
No, I saw his comment saying he did it, so I guess he meant to. This is a policy discussion, plain and simple, and both arbitration and deletion pages aren't appropriate. People add proposed policies to the wikipedia name space all the time, and that's where I think this idea should have been all along. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 23:53, 18 Aug 2004 (UTC)

These statistics *are* useful for ordinary mortals[edit]

I've seen (and contributed to) a lot of talk about whether these old Rambot articles belong in Wikipedia, and I just remembered an exercise I went through that shows they do have value, even as is.

A few months ago, I was trying to figure some kind of rough estimate of the economic conditions between my hometown and county, and my current town and county. Since I already had a Wikipedia window up (when don't I? ☺), I just checked the four relevant articles for some basic population and income data. I found it very useful to have these statistics available. (I also found myself wandering through a few more neighboring towns, just out of curiosity.) I've tried to penetrate U.S. government data websites before and have mostly given up unless the issue were really important. I think these basic articles are not only a good starting point for robust ones, but they have their uses even in their raw form. — Jeff Q 00:25, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)


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