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

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
When you base your statistics on numbers that have a pseudo relevance, the
resulting statistics have as a consequence the same pseudo relevance or
less. When as a result of concentrating on inflating the wrong numbers the
results are called "tragic" as you have done, it is clear that the numbers
everybody is concentrating on are the wrong ones.

No amount of quibbling will change this fact, you can increase your sample
size as much as you like, you can include all kinds of other factors that
have a tangential relation to the numbers considered but it will not make
the results any better. It will not change the numbers you are basing the
argument on; they will not give meaningful results when people try and
improve the numbers.

This whole argumentation is based on the metric of number of articles. More
relevant are the numbers of reads for a project. By and large, there is no
way in which the numbers can be manipulated in a way that can be called
detrimental to individual Wikipedias and Wikipedia in general.

The most tragic part of this whole argument is that it is based on the wrong
premises. The result of all of these argument make no real difference. I can
safely argue that the big increase in the number of articles for the Volapuk
Wikipedia provided not only a large amount of new articles, it increased the
visibility of this language, it increased the number of people editing in
Volapuk it is a genuine success. The problem is that for all kinds of
reasons people are of the opinion that it diminishes the success of *their*
Wikipedia and a rich variety of arguments have been used to diminish the
success of all the hard work that went into making this happen. THIS IS SAD

When we use as a different metric particularly the number of people using a
project, there is no way that anyone can argue that the numbers are
unacceptable. It is obvious that the number of people speaking a language
will impact the relative numbers. At the same time any and all activities
that stimulate the numbers of readers are positive to the Wikipedia and WMF
aims. For languages with few people the method of gaining more readers may
be different. When all the intellectual activity is centred on these
methods, we have a positive discussion in stead of the current discussion
that will not bring us anything that I consider worthwhile..

My challenge to you all is to argue that your arguments have any relevance
except for the fact that we have always considered relevance by number of
activities... If your arguments are not convincing, you have all the
arguments why we should ditch the number of articles as the yardstick we
measure the relevance of our Wikipedia projets by...

Thanks,
      GerardM

On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 3:49 PM, Ziko van Dijk <zvandijk at googlemail.com>
wrote:

> Maybe this is not the most popular item, but I do like to comment on
> the news about Japanese and Polish Wikipedias and their 500,000
> articles each. In fact, jp.WP actually has 500,000, but pl.WP does
> not.
> In an attempt to compare Wikipedia language editions I have clicked
> the button "random articles" and with a sample of 50 clicks each I
> have calculated how many articles a language edition really has, minus
> all those pseudo articles.
>
> A pseudo article is e.g.
> http://pdc.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikini
> http://co.wikipedia.org/wiki/191
> http://ksh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varsseveld
> http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandil
> http://vo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poplar_Bluff
>
> Many Wikipedias loose, in my calculation, quite a huge percentage of
> their articles. There is one honourable exception: Japanese Wikipedia,
> which in 50 clicks showed absolutely no pseudo article. If Japanese
> Wikipedia would have such a floppy policy about new articles as many
> others have, jp.WP were already close to one million "articles". Pl.WP
> has for about 300,000 real articles, very respectable, but not what it
> seems to be.
>
> Since the beginnings, Wikipedians report about the number of articles,
> having to tell something about to the media and to be proud about
> their achievements. They rank Wikipedia language editions by the
> number of articles. This has caused tragical dynamics: many
> Wikipedians and Wikipedias are so obsessed with this number that they
> produce rubbish articles to show off. Volapük Wikipedia with more than
> 100,000 pseudo articles created by a single bot using user is only the
> top of the iceberg, and when someone called to close vo.WP, vo.WP was
> supported by a amazing number of users from many language editions:
> cosi fan tutte. Wikipedians could and should use their time for more
> useful article work.
>
> It would be good if the community found a different way to compare or
> to measure it's successes.
>
> Ziko
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Ziko van Dijk
> NL-Silvolde
>
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