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

[Kolhapuri]

The problem is well known and discussed at Marathi Wikipedia, but we
at Marathi Wikipedia like to take all contributions that come to us.
We know that number of articles doesn't mean anything. But  when there
are only handful of contributors, we don't like to lose any of them by
stopping them from doing what they like to do. Some users want to add
new stub articles to make it easy for others to add content, we don't
think stopping them will do any good. We know that we lack meaningful
articles with enough information and there are some people who work on
it. You can only do some much with limited resources.

By the way Cricket articles ask people to refer 'Sachin Tendulkar'
article as an example if they want to expand it.

Regards,
Pratik

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 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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-- 
regards,
Pratik Dixit
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http://mr.wikipedia.org
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