> Basic articles (called “stubs”) were systematically created based on content extracted from structured databases. These stubs are then edited by the broader Wikipedia community, while “bots” keep the structured content in sync with the source databases.
(The "structured content" mentioned is the info box on the right-hand side of a gene article. Nowadays I believe this is populated directly from Wikidata[2].)
Note: I am a member of the lab that runs Gene Wiki, but my work is unrelated.
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Can't speak to tech / science / art in the Visayan space.
I'm curious about the actual quality of these articles. The OP says "the majority [of a random 1000] were surprisingly well constructed", but it's not clear what that even means. Does the author of the article know Cebuano (or Swedish or Waray-Waray, which are other languages this bot writes in) well enough to judge? Or does it just mean the articles looked like regular articles (ie they have all the infoboxes and other trappings of human-editor-driven articles)?
Having some basic information already present means that potential editors won't have to start from an empty page, making it easier to see where content can be added.
Of course if what you're interested in is actually how much humans contribute to Wikipedia in a given language, you'll need to ignore bot activity, but that doesn't make it useless.
Likely, but not always. I've encountered areas, for example Bohol, in that region where only the local language was well-understood.
And "Taglish" is about as understandable as Japlish - lots of similarities to English, but what does it mean?
Same in Indonesia. Outside of the main cities on Sumatra, especially with older people, only the local language is used daily.
It would be most interesting to know what the 148 active Cebuano Wikipedia users think of the 5,331,028 articles the bot created, ostensibly for them. Too bad nobody apparently cared to ask.
In particular, since Cebuano speakers are likely to be fluent in Tagalog and/or English as well, they can easily use one of the other Wikipedia editions too. Without the hyperactive bot, the much smaller Cebuano Wikipedia would arguably be more relevant, reflecting topics truly of interest to the community.
While the number of articles is a convenient way of comparing Wikipedia language editions, it only works as such to the extent that the articles are kept to a certain standard. It seems to me that what we are observing here is yet another example of the situation that when a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure.