Yes, the panel was right, Volapuk was the work of a bot run amok. The bot operator ‎Smeira (the only active member of the Volapuk community) said that he wanted to ‎artificially inflate his numbers to advertise the Volapuk language. Please note there are an estimated 20 speakers of this language world-wide.‎

The bot-operator essentially took databases of geographic data combined it with data out ‎of the various wikis, and fed them to his bot and out spat a bunch of articles. ‎Unfortunately, last I checked, the bot wasn’t well-controlled, and many of the pages were ‎filled with leftover vestiges of text and broken templates where the article was stolen ‎from. So, yes, there are 115000 stubs there, but they probably wouldn’t be considered ‎quality stubs by the other 19 Volapukists of the world.‎

Since the guy started there have been a couple of failed attempts to get him to stop ‎puffing up the scores in the form of Requests for Deletion at Meta. In the second ‎proposal, Jimmy Wales himself has asked them to stop it and play nice, but stopped short ‎of declaring an edict to close it down. I think both of those proposals were defeated by ‎Smeira’s bringing in outside voters to support his position, and browbeating everyone ‎that disagreed with him.‎

Essentially, the Volapuk Wikipedia is chock-full of geography stubs. 97% of their ‎activity supports the bot-made cookie-cutter geography stubs. ‎

The only good that I’ve seen come out of this is the Esperanto Wikipedia giving up bot-‎creation of articles cold-turkey. We have called a moratorium on new articles by bot, and ‎we’re now creating articles the good old fashioned way. Yes, it’s slower, but there’s a big ‎difference in quality.‎

that would have made more sense if you’d said, “every user would have to download the 133gigabyte full-edit-history dump, in order for a program to analyze any part of it.”