[Foundation-l] 10 thoughts on how to improve the quality of Swedish Wikipedia?

[Yaroslav M. Blanter]

> On 12/03/2008, Lennart Guldbrandsson <wikihannibal at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>  ===Thought number one: delete the bad articles===
>>  I want to begin with a controversial proposal. It was controversial on
>> dewp
>>  and the result there is still not totally clear, but I think that it
>> may be
>>  good to start with a jolt.
>>  The proposal is to '''remove all bad articles'''. Bad articles come in
>> many
>>  forms: stubs and substubs, articles with low real content (e.g. peacock
>> and
>>  weasel terms), articles without proper language, articles that are
>>  confusing, lists that can never be completed, etc, etc. By deleting
>> them we
>>  won't have a [[:Category:Wikipedia maintenance|maintenance page]]
>> that's
>>  always full of things to do and has become a constant guilty
>> conscience,
>>  rather than a project which some time will be more or less fulfilled.
>>  How would this be done? Well, the active users in a particular topic,
>> for
>>  example a [[:Wikipedia:WikiProject|project]] or a
>>  [[:Wikipedia:Portal|portal]] (in other words: people who are
>> interested),
>>  regularly go through "their" categories and weed out the worst articles
>> -
>>  ''of course, they should enhance the articles they can". Enhancements
>> are
>>  naturally better, but in many instances it would take such a long time
>> that
>>  it's better to simply remove the articles.
>>  '''Summary:''' This deletion proposal would lead to svwp downsizing the
>>  article count. We could even go below 250,000 articles. But think of it
>> like
>>  this: what kind of press release we could issue! "Wikipedia takes out
>> all
>>  garbage."
>
>
> This approach has already led to severe public relations problems for
> en:wp, including a writeup in The Economist.
>
> It also implies the live, working wiki is a finished polished product,
> which kills working on it. en:wp has 2 million articles, but there's
> at least 20 million topics that would be covered but aren't yet if you
> just include all towns and state-level politicians.
>
>
> - d.
>
>

Actually, Swedish Wikipedia is notoriously known for a huge number of
one-line articles. In Russian Wikipedia, where I am mostly active, it is
customary to justify the deletion discussion of very short articles by
saying "We are not Swedish Wikipedia". The problem there is much more
severe than in de.wp and en.wp. Especially once you realize they are in
the top ten ONLY because of these articles.

Cheers,
Yaroslav