Is Pleiades a content farm?

More importantly, is Pleiades adequately distinguishable from a content farm? We don't host advertisements on Pleiades and don't make any money off a single page view or click-through (though we certainly hope that enough page views help make a case for continued funding), but Pleiades does have one characteristic that's becoming identified with content farming: shallow or low-quality content.

To see what I mean, take a look at our source material for Pleiades. We have many long tables with a few columns of very terse information:

Grid  Name                Period  Modern Name / Location  Reference
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
B2    Acqua Acetosa       A       Laurentina              Bedini 1981
B2    Acquafredda         A       Rossi                   Diana 1984
B2    Ad Aquas Salvias    RL      Tre Fontane             Ferrari 1957, 33-48
...

From these records we've created resources like the one at http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/422802/. That one didn't initially have coordinates or a feature type, these have only come recently from our partner project, DARMC. Before that, we had a location that could only be described as low quality. The details of the resource remain sketchy. One might say "shallow". This has been our strategy for Pleiades: start broad and shallow, fill in and refine incrementally, with writers producing over time high quality place pages like:

• Aphrodisias

• Halieis

• Mareia

• Zeugma

Until recently, the strategy seemed pragmatic and sound. I may have even used some farming metaphors when describing Pleiades to people over the past few years. If I had a dollar for every time I've heard or read someone on "growing communities", I'd be typing this from my yacht in the Aegean. Times are changing: sites that go deep on topics like Stack Overflow are favored, sites that go broad and shallow are disfavored. I didn't pay enough attention to our search ranking before the new policy, but I see the count of our pages in Google's index dropping a bit over the last week. Until I see them bounce back up, I'd caution academic projects who are looking to be well placed in search results against taking the same approach.