Wikipedia

Rambot

Joined 9 December 2002
Deactivated
This bot is no longer active on Wikipedia.

See the rambot FAQ.

The rambot was a bot used primarily to add and maintain U.S. county and city articles. The bot was first made to be a front-end that was programmed to add premade U.S. city articles; however, it was custom-programmed to update existing information with some intelligence. The rambot currently functions as a generic Spellbot. It is run by Ram-Man. The name rambot was coined by Ortolan88. The birth date of the rambot is unclear, but the best guess on October 5, 2002 at 19:50, creating the first rambot city article: Autaugaville, Alabama. The User:rambot account was created on December 8, 2002.

If the bot is run without supervision the IP address is normally placed on this webpage. However, normally it is run with supervision and any problems should be given to Ram-Man.

rambot Article Translation Project

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See: User:rambot/translation

Free the Rambot Articles project

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Project description

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See the Multi-Licensing FAQ

98% of all U.S. city and county articles have been created and edited by the rambot many times. In the course of history many other people have also edited these articles. My goal is to ask those people who have made edits to any city or county article (or even all articles) to multi-license their edits so that the so-called rambot articles can be available under flexible licenses other than the GFDL. So far a number of people have agreed to do so, which they can do because each person is the copyright holder to their specific changes. To date very few people have opposed doing this; however, when someone does not desire to do this it is fully within their rights and we will have to work around it. Ultimately, if we reach the point where over 95% of copyrightable edits are dual licensed, then there will be the concern of an incompatible Wikipedia forking or the consideration of changing Wikipedia's license, but that is all academic at this point.

I find the GFDL cumbersome and unwieldy compared to the Creative Commons licenses, launched after Wikipedia was born. It's unfortunate that we can't get in touch with every single contributor ever and get them to agree to relicense their work. I'd like to put my contributions in the public domain, but if everyone did that it would just allow the Wikipedia mirrors (most of whom are purely concerned with making money out of other people's work by advertising) to get rid of the already tiny and deliberately obscure notices explaining where they got their content from. Since I retain the copyright on all my contributions, I may well decide to place them all in the public domain in future. -- User:Trilobite

All English Wikipedia main, main talk, and template namespace articles or edits produced by the rambot are multi-licensed as described below. I encourage you to multi-license your contributions as well.

Minor edits multi-licensed into the public domain
I agree to multi-license my eligible text contributions marked as minor edits, unless otherwise stated, under Wikipedia's copyright terms and into the public domain. Please be aware that other contributors might not do the same, so if you want to use my minor edit contributions in the public domain, please check the multi-licensing guide.
  Multi-licensed with any Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License  
I agree to multi-license my text contributions, unless otherwise stated, under Wikipedia's copyright terms and the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license version 1.0 and 2.0, and the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike license version 2.0. Please be aware that other contributors might not do the same, so if you want to use my contributions under the Creative Commons terms, please check the CC dual-license and Multi-licensing guides.

With respect to the permission granted below, I specifically add Anthony DiPierro in addition to the Wikimedia Foundation for any contributions automatically generated and added by the rambot from the public domain census bureau statistics. The above exclusions still apply.

  Licensing rights granted to Wikimedia Foundation
I grant non-exclusive permission for the Wikimedia Foundation Inc. to relicense my text contributions under any copyleft license that it chooses, provided it maintains the free and open spirit of the GFDL. This permission acknowledges that future licensing needs of the Wikimedia projects may need adapting in unforeseen fashions to facilitate other uses, formats, and locations. It is given for as long as this banner remains.


Progress

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Approximate progress is based off of the statistics supplied here
1.4% of all users, 12.8% of users with 100+ edits
29.14% or 1,532K main namespace edits (excludes anonymous edits and those users who license geographic articles only)
19% of Wikipedia's articles, assuming that all edit behavior is equal, all articles receive an equal number of edits, and 35% of edits are anonymous. This is a non-probabalistic guess that is wildly inaccurate.
The following statistics represent the totals of users that have responded to requests for multi-licensing regardless of their choice. The project is "completed" when 100% of users have responded:
1.5% of all users, 14.0% of users with 100+ edits.
34.87% or 1,833K main namespace edits (excludes anonymous edits).
Only 8.9% of users asked and have opted to use the GFDL only; however, together their edits make up 3.1% or 165K of Wikipedia's edits.

See the full list of supporters: User:Rambot/Progress

Current tasks

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  • MAJOR TASK: The rambot Article Translation Project
  • Add UN/LOCODEs to those U.S. cities/counties/states where one exists.
  • Add Template:Mapit-US-cityscale templates to all cities that have latitude and longitude coordinates.
  • Add {{GR|X}} templates to replace the [[Geographic references#X|<sup>X</sup>]] reference links. Adding missing references to the geographical coordinates added from FIPS data.
  • Add geographical coordinates from the UN/LOCODE database for those cities missing FIPS geo coordinates.
  • New York towns that are hamlets: hamlet (place) to Administrative divisions of New York#Hamlet
  • Update references
  • Update racial links
  • Waiting Permission: License the dot-map project images under the CC-by in addition to the GFDL if the authors agree to do so. This is an extension to the multi-licensing of the highlighted county images.

Outstanding problems

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I'm not sure how you'd do the searches, but I've seen all sorts of weird edits being done to the RamBot-generated Demographics sections in the community articles that are on my watchlist. Sometimes it's just simple stuff like changing Latino to Chicano, but I've also seen stuff like the percentages changed so that no Latinos are counted as White.

Another problem I think may be that for some of the smaller communities, there may be nobody who has edited the articles but Rambot and anonymous IPs, and the articles may be on nobody's watchlists. Who knows what has ended up in those articles. Would there be a way to search for those types of articles? BlankVerse ∅ 22:19, 8 September 2005 (UTC)

If people use Chicano, and you see it, please revert the changes. Eventually (2010) we will replace all of the information anyway. Plus if it was really required, I could run the bot and perform a "fact check". — Ram-Man (comment) (talk) 00:48, September 9, 2005 (UTC)

Requested cities

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The rambot has completed adding all the census bureau's cities to Wikipedia. This list forms those cities which are desired, but will probably have to be done without the help of a bot. Anyone can try to create and improve them because other Wikipedians have requested them. Note: Some town pages were created by RamBot using the syntax: TownName (town), State.

Future work

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  • Add information for all Indian reservations and Pueblos in the US, and add information to cities and towns about if they're on any Indian reservations or pueblos.
  • Add FIPS codes, geographical coordinates, phone area and calling codes, time zones, zip codes, and elevation to the all places in the U.S.
  • Complete city disambiguation pages for those needing it. Also complete redirects for those cities not needing disambiguation pages.
  • Give citations in the country articles that use the CIA World Factbook and U.S. State Department data.
  • Use a different source for geographical coordinates and add them to the articles that do not have any coordinates yet.
  • Add WikiProject boilerplating to the talk page of the state's cities.
  • Evaluate using in instead of as of for dates.
  • Update the data based on Census bureau updates.
  • Disambiguate duplicate pages like Batavia (town), New York and Batavia (city), New York.
  • Verify the precision for the percentages used in the demographic data.

Other work

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  • Partially automated SpellBot to do spell checking. The spellbot has currently checked most of the articles from 1 to A. Currently it is not running pending an update to the code to make the bot more intelligent. It may need to be plugged into a dictionary.
 
For the seemingly impossible amount of useful, accurate, and completely unbiased articles you have created and continue to update, despite being one of the youngest contributors to Wikipedia, I award you with this special Barnstar award: the Tireless Contributor Barnstar. Batteries not included.
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