[Foundation-l] Tragical dynamics: that run for the number of articles

[Tomasz Ganicz]

2008/6/27 Ziko van Dijk <zvandijk at googlemail.com>:
> Among the Big Wikipedias, the pl.WP has one of the lowest quota of
> real articles:
>
>        Artikel (off.)  realt. Art.  Artikel W (Quot.)
> EN      1400000 1344000 0,96
> DE      696000  668160  0,96
> FR      613000  514920  0,84
> JA      466000  466000  1
> IT      408000  301920  0,74
> PL      467000  298880  0,64
> ES      326000  293400  0,9
> NL      404000  274720  0,68
> SV      272000  217600  0,8
> PT  338000      209560  0,62
> RU      233000  195720  0,84
> ZH      164000  144320  0,88
> (most numbers from jan. 2008, en, de and pt older; estimations should
> be rounded, in fact)
>


Can you explain how this evalution been done? How do you distinguish
between "real" and other articles? Especially I don't believe in
statiscts shown for en Wikipedia. I have a feeing that there is much
more bot created articles in en Wikipedia than your statistcs show.

About a year ago I wanted to evaluate the number of bot created
articles created in Polish Wikipedia, and then evaluate how many of
them were expanded by humans. Unfortunatelly it was impossible to
perform as the bot owners do not keep records of its activity. Anyway
we checked randomly what happened with bot-created articles about
Polish villages and small towns, which was the very first bot
produciton in our Wikikipedia. As I was strongly opposed several years
ago to produce bot-created articles but failed to persuade my fellow
wikipedians, I just wanted to prove that it was indeed bad idea.
However, the study shown that around 70% of them were efectively
expanded by humans. Villagers added quite a lot of useful stuff to
these articles like histories of their villages, pictures of
interesting buildings etc. Can you explain if these articles are
treated "real" or "not real" in your statistics and why?


-- 
Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz
http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek
http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/
http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html