[Wikimediaindia-l] Cricket articles on Marathi Wikipedia, other meaningless inflation of article counts

[YellowMonkey]

I don't know who to talk to about it specifically, but there is some problem
with the cricket articles on the Marathi Wikipedia; perhaps it is indicative
of a wider trend

Lots of English wikipedia Australian cricketer articles have Marathi
interwikis more than any other language. But going to all of them, they
consist of three parts

*Stub message
*Empty infobox
*The same five words as following

उदाहरणादाखल सचिन
तेंडुलकर<https://mail.google.com/wiki/%E0%A4%B8%E0%A4%9A%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%A8_%E0%A4%A4%E0%A5%87%E0%A4%82%E0%A4%A1%E0%A5%81%E0%A4%B2%E0%A4%95%E0%A4%B0>हा
लेख पहा.

The wikilink goes to Sachin Tendulkar, judging by the photo

I went to the Marathi article on Len Hutton, and clicked on the cat

http://mr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%A4%B5%E0%A4%B0%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%97:%E0%A4%87%E0%A4%82%E0%A4%97%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%B2%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%B6_%E0%A4%95%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%B0%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%95%E0%A5%87%E0%A4%9F_%E0%A4%96%E0%A5%87%E0%A4%B3%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%A1%E0%A5%82

Presumably this is the cat for English cricketers? I randomly clicked on
about 15 of them and all of them have the same sentence. The same thing
happens on teh Australian, NZ and South African cats by following the
interwiki, about 800 articles appear to be completely empty or more useless
than a substub.

--------
Whoever did this, all they are doing is meaninglessly inflating the article
count with articles that are all but empty except for an irrelevant comment
about Sachin Tendulkar.

They may think it makes Marathi Wikipedia look better on the article count
rankings, but it is only likely to make it look like a farce, especially if
this is widespread.

It may trick a few admins in other Wikipedias into being impressed and
generate some fake prestige, but there is also a chance that anyone who
might use/contribute might consider the WP to be a joke, or people from
other projects who bother to take a look will think that the culture of the
Marathi project is to fraudulently inflate themselves with misleading
statistics

I checked another Indic wp with the random function and saw a very
substantial minority consisting of empty section headers cut and pasted
around the place, although the depth ranking is very high.

The depth can be gamed very easily, but it doesn't do anything useful except
for false bragging and probably harm in the long term

Can someone who knows Marathi deal with those cricket articles please.

Thanks
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