I'll repeat my earlier parenthetical comment: "Had you written that it wasn't appropriate for Wikipedia, than that's a different issue. I speak now only of the broad category of "encyclopedia"."

I mentioned dictionaries because I misunderstood you. Thank you for the correction.

"There is plenty you could add to gumboil" is of course true. It's also true for nearly every single deleted item in WP, including those which aren't sufficiently notable. It's also true of nearly every item which is currently rolled into a larger article. (Hence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recurring_The_Simpsons_... vs. http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/Bernice_Hibbert )

This is an eternal debate by WP editors. Well-defined requirements and boundaries are not possible, only rough guidelines for most areas. This is one such area.

I agree that the information about B. plantaginea is weak. This is not atypical of biological entries in WP. Consider http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calabash_tree , which I chose because it's only a few lines longer than the short entry in the 1910 Encyclopedia Britannica. (BTW, the Swedish entry in WP has a picture of the gourd, while the English one does not.)

After 9 years this stub entry still doesn't answer some of your questions, like "Is it peculiar to any animal's diets? How does it propagate? What does it even look like? Does it have defense mechanisms? Does it survive arid climates well? Are humans allergic to it at all?"

Worse is the line "The fruit pulp is used traditionally for respiratory problems." It doesn't say if it's actually effective, and if so, what is the method of treatment. Is it eaten? Smeared on the chest like a mentholated topical cream? Used as a suppository?

Thus your criticisms, while quite valid, should be tempered by context.

As another example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hairy_long-nosed_armadillo is also a 4-line stub. If you look in the history you'll see it was once much more informative. This is because it copied text verbatim from http://armadillo-online.org/dasypus.html#pilosus . That source is under the CC by-nc-sa license, while WP does not accept non-commercial only license, so I believe it was rolled back for that reason.

It's relevant that the armadillo page was created by a bot in 2007, in almost exactly the current form. The main issue is likely that WP is a lousy place for species information. Perhaps it's because the primary literature doesn't meet the copyright requirements, and specialists who can create appropriate text are more interested in contributing to specialist compendiums?

For what it's worth, http://www.conabio.gob.mx/malezasdemexico/poaceae/brachiaria... says it's from Florida and Mexico to South America, with secondary distributions in the Old World. Kew gives details in (technical) English at http://www.kew.org/data/grasses-db/www/imp01488.htm .

Neither list anything about allergies, its defensive mechanisms, etc.

My own belief is that this bot information for B. plantaginea, etc. should be in an infobox of some sort, rather than free text. I feel that if I edit the text to include the information I identified, then a future bot sweep may be unable to handle the changes automatically.