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

[Shiju Alex]

I think you need to have a look at Hindi and Nepal basha (newari) wikipedias
also.

Some time back (2 years before) I pointed out this issue in this mailing
list itself. (
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2008-January/000092.html
)



All the top 5 language wikipedias that I mentioned in this statistical
report
<http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B4hBi4hJ-5mnZmMxYzFhNTYtZWU5Yy00ZTAwLTliZDItMWJiZGI5MGUxZGQ2&hl=en>are
following the same strategy to increase the article count. It is really sad
to see that even Hindi wikipedia, which has the maximum user base among all
the other Indian languages, is also following this same method to increase
the article count. (Hindi wikipedia was having 30,000 artcles on June 2009.
But now it has more than 50,000.  But  the active users in that wiki is
still less than that of Tamil or Malayalam wiki.

We can easily make out the quality of the articles in a wiki  if you look at
the parameters *bytes per article* and *articles with size more than 2000
bytes*.


The fact that all these thousands (or ten thousands) of one-liners are
created by one or two admins (or some bots) of that wikipedia is really
alarming. The very purpose of wiki software and collaborative authoring fail
there. These type of users are killing their wiki projects and *prevent any
potential new users* to start editing in that wiki.

Readers will not get any benefit from these type of wikis. They still need
to go to English wiki for some good/fruit information about any topic.

Shiju







On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 12:00 PM, YellowMonkey <blnguyen2230 at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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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