Hi,
There is a phenomenon in Wikipedias in smaller languages: There activity
level of people who actually know the language of the wiki and make
meaningful text contributions is relatively low, and the activity of people
from other wikis who make various technical edits that don't require the
knowledge of the language is relatively high.
I call the latter group "helpful strangers". They can do things such as
fixing categories, fixing invalid wiki syntax, editing templates, adding
images, etc.—things that don't require knowing the language well, and can
be achieved by copying and pasting, by guessing things from interlanguage
links, or by writing language-neutral things, such as numbers or filenames.
Now, I've written "relatively low" and "relatively high", but
these are
just my anecdotal impressions. Has anyone thought of a way to quantify this
more precisely?
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore