See also User talk:Rambot/Delete
Perhaps we could flag and pipe minimalist American geography articles. They are hardly interesting to anyone and they certainly discourage the random pages use as an editing tool. It's not just a substitute for opening a Volume at random by the reader: for the editor it churns articles to the top of the to do list. if tagging were made available, random change junkies would have the rambot stubs filtered out in no time. Anytime it was filled out to the point of interst of a random user, the flag could be lowered. If someone forgot, or didn't know about it, there is no problem 'cause the next time a Wikipedian accessed that page they could lower the flag. User:Two16
- I don't quite understand the obsession some people have with hiding one particular category of articles that could desperately use some research and human addition. --Brion 06:43 Jan 24, 2003 (UTC)
- Brion, you are ignoring some very important things:
- Many of us are not American. There is a world outside of the USA, you know. And if someone from, say, Australia, sees a so-called "article" (with almost no non-numeric content) about some obscure township somewhere in the middle of the USA, what's he supposed to do about it? You're just wasting his time! Even if he's not looking to edit articles, but is only interested in browsing... my gosh! it's like reading the telephone directory!
- Same goes for most of the Americans here. Let's say there are forty thousand towns in the USA. That is just a guess. And let us say that each of us Americans is familiar with forty of those towns, which is probably greater than the truth (but what do I know?). So even an American would have only a 1 in 1000 chance of being able to edit an article about a town. And after a while, seeing all those town articles is a total BORE. Don't you just want to turn them the heck OFF?
- I am not sure whether or not I correctly understand the difference between "information" and "data", but it seems to me that these articles are pure data with little or no information. If data is what you want, I hope somebody uploads a star catalog! \(`o')/
- I think I get your point, Brion. What you are trying to say is that you want "random page" to show the town articles just to remind people that they are there. If that's you want, then have "random page" use this procedure: Choose a random number from 0 to 7. If it is 0, show a town article. If it is 1 through 7, choose another article. You could, if you wanted, be sly and try to bias the distribution of town articles towards the user's home state (if you can tell where they're accessing the Internet from, what their time zone setting is, etc.) But really, once you've edited articles for your town and the surrounding towns, and possibly other towns you're familiar with, what more is there to do, other than crib information from books, the Internet, etc.?
- If you ask for a "Random page", by gum you'll get a random page. If you don't like it, push the button again and see if the next one interests you. This goes equally for American towns, Canadian towns, Russian towns, African towns, Australian towns, South American towns, Chinese towns, Antarctic towns, tiny islands in the Pacific, craters on the moon, characters in the Simpsons, obscure politications and writers, films that won some award a hundred years ago, and the number of pimples on a long-dead feudal ruler's butt. I hope this sums up my opinion on the matter. --Brion 20:31 Jan 28, 2003 (UTC)
- I hope adding a comment at what is now the middle of the article isn't too bad a breach of etiquette (although I'd have thought shouting might equally be :-D), but I would like to pick a hole in the above argument: "This goes equally for American towns... Russian towns... craters on the moon..." That would be fine if it were true, but since nothing has yet been added on quite the scale of US towns, the chances of getting a US town are much greater than those of getting a Russian one - in other words, the random page is unfairly biased towards US towns at the moment. It's like you've made one of the sides of a dice bigger somehow, and are continuing to throw it as though it was fair; of course, once a few more lists are added en masse (assuming the rambot entries aren't instead deleted) the other sides of the dice will grow too, so it will be fair. Until then it would be useful to have a feature that artificially weighted the dice back the other way - i.e. deliberately under-represented rambot articles to be fair to non-rambot ones. I don't know if this will make a difference to anyone's opinions on anything, but it's what I think. - IMSoP 00:04, 26 Jan 2004 (UTC)