Sometimes I appreciate what you call "info trash." For example, I assume there is a bot that turns census data into articles for every incorporated community in the US, like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency,_Missouri.
I still think the article is useful as is, with just the map, data sheet, and demographics, and of course many incorporations have additional human-composed information added.
I could imagine some more structured data source, where the main article redirects to a table and scrolls to the correct spot. I would be fine with that, but as far as I know that concept doesn't exist on Wikipedia.
> I could imagine some more structured data source, where the main article redirects to a table and scrolls to the correct spot. I would be fine with that, but as far as I know that concept doesn't exist on Wikipedia.
The structured data source now exists, but how to present its data is still being worked out. You can add information to it now, since the goal is to collect a bunch of structured information and then incrementally figure out how to display it, either on its own or integrated into Wikipedia articles (bot additions here are also very welcome): https://www.wikidata.org
I believe there's going to be some offloading of some structured Wikipedia information so it pulls from Wikidata in the future, instead of being maintained "manually" in articles. For example the geotags that are currently buried in Wikipedia articles' markup will probably be centralized to Wikidata soonish and just pulled from there to display. And infoboxes may be auto-populated from the Wikidata information as well. Sending people to auto-generated stub articles when a "real" article is missing is an interesting idea that might happen longer-term.
Looking at the history of that page,[0] it appears a couple of different bots have worked on it, with human intervention. (I suspect ``Ram-Man'' is an earlier version of ``Rambot'', but I could be wrong.)
I've read pages like that before, and it never once occurred to me that they were anything other than the result of sheer human bloody-mindedness. They're not `exciting', but they're very clearly written in an easily parseable way that doesn't scream ``machine-generated'' to me. If this is indicative, the quality of output of these bots is excellent, and a good use of automation --- let the bots fill out the dry factual stuff, and the humans write the less tangible, non-statistical stuff.
Ram-Man is a human account. The same person operates the Rambot bot account. You can click on their usernames on the history page to see their user pages, which usually describe these things.
I still think the article is useful as is, with just the map, data sheet, and demographics, and of course many incorporations have additional human-composed information added.
I could imagine some more structured data source, where the main article redirects to a table and scrolls to the correct spot. I would be fine with that, but as far as I know that concept doesn't exist on Wikipedia.