[nmrm]

Reading the article, I think some of it is more of a "why?" than a "why not?", since the articles are factually correct but are mostly just lists of facts and not really something you couldn't find in any number of other resources.

For people who do serious article writing, I imagine this might be considered as a "cheapening" their work. For instance, I imagine some editors also resent the notion that encyclopedia editing is somehow reducible to plugging facts into the right templates. Of course the bot's authors don't really believe they are creating articles as high-quality as good human-edited entries, but the emotional reaction on the part of other editors is at least something I can comprehend.

I'm not really in tune with Wikipedia, so this is mostly conjecture.

edit: reverted edit, added first sentence of 2nd paragraph.

[Crito]

> "and not really something you couldn't find in any number of other resources."

The same should be able to be said about everything on Wikipedia, since Wikipedia is not supposed to have original research and should have a source for everything.

The "Why?" would then be "Because it is better to search for [obscure butterfly] and find a short list of fact than to search for that butterfly and find nothing at all."

[thret]

Exactly.

A stub also lowers the barrier of entry for new users wanting to add an obscure butterfly they've just tracked down.

[nmrm]

> The same should be able to be said about everything on Wikipedia

I don't think so. Well-written encyclopedic entries are in far shorter supply than bare lists of facts.

I guess the fundamental difference of opinion is between those who feel Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and those who feel it's a dumping ground for human knowledge. Note that I'm not taking sides, just trying to explain the root causes for the difference of opinion.

Also, on a purely technical note, I very much doubt that you couldn't find the information in bot-generated articles anywhere else using a search engine. If that were the case, where are the bots getting the data?

[DanBC]

Bots could be concatenating two or threes different sets to create one stub per butterfly.

Or bots could be taking something in a weird set of scans, OCRing that, and then putting it in a stub. This would be troubling unless there was a human checking the quality of the OCR.

There is plenty of stuff that is public domain and not online in a useful form.

[urizen]

Problem is that for any obscure organism you'll need to know what it is before you can search for it on WP. There is no ability to do that on WP, if the articles on the species has an image the chances are good that it will be a related species. Then there is the problem of some one coming along and adding mangled 'facts' to the article or 'facts' derived from 19th century works.

[dkhar]

> ...Reading the article, I think some of it is more of a "why?" than a "why not?", since the articles are factually correct but are mostly just lists of facts and not really something you couldn't find in any number of other resources.

The argument I'd make for "why?" is that Wikipedia is more accessible and more reliably available than most other resources. I mean, if the government of the Philippines had a web-based, up-to-date list of towns with some basic information, it might make sense to offload the effort of maintaining that information to them. As it stands, though, not even the US has such a directory -- so Wikipedia picks up the slack (or at least it does for towns in the US).