On 2014-06-24 04:52, Tanweer Morshed wrote:
That's a great news that the Vietnamese Wikipedia has crossed 1M articles. What are the significant reasons behind Vietnamese Wikipedia's such growth? Is it just the usage of such clever Bots (that you have mentioned) or contribution by the Vietnamese Wikipedians? And actually how does the Cheer!-bot generate articles? Does it translate articles from English (or other) Wikipedia? And apart from translating, can it set and maintain correctly other aspects of Wikisyntax and coding?
A great many of the Vietnamese Wikipedia's recent articles have been created automatically using bots, manually with word processors and mail merge, or semi-automatically with machine translators like (presumably) Google Translator Toolkit. Nonetheless, Cheers!-bot held a moratorium on new articles around the million-article mark, so that day was all about writing articles the old fashioned way.
Predictably, our bot articles are more infobox than prose. On the other hand, they do have correct grammar and wiki syntax, which cannot be said for most machine-translated articles, comprehensive as they may be. Cheers! is one of our most experienced editors and has done an admirable job correcting errors, whereas some machine translator users have uploaded incomprehensible articles anonymously, giving us no opportunity to engage and educate.
I can't say for certain how Cheers!-bot generates species stubs, but its earlier U.S. geographic stubs were "translated" from the Spanish Wikipedia's own bot-created stubs. I'm in the process of cleaning them up, translating the occasional Spanish place name to Vietnamese. We're also integrating our [[vi:Template:Infobox settlement]] with Wikidata, to provide more current information with minimal maintenance. For example, see the infobox at [[vi:Loveland, Ohio]], which passes only three parameters but provides 18 rows of information.
The surge in bot-created stubs has alarmed some members of the Vietnamese Wikipedia community. One frequent theme in our village pump is that our "depth" at [[m:List of Wikipedias]] has fallen from over a hundred (one of the highest) to just 15 (one of the lowest) in a few years. Even taking the depth metric with a grain of salt, I think this observation has led us to a newfound appreciation for edits, non-articles, and maybe even authentic, hand-made articles.
More importantly, the million-article milestone has shed a light on our seemingly low number of active editors. Some have expressed concern that the steadily rising article count has disincentivized readers from creating own articles on their own. So we're discussing some changes to our main page and messages to better engage potential contributors. We've also integrated tightly with VisualEditor -- the sandbox, "no such article" message, and "no search results" message all send users to VisualEditor by default -- hopefully lowering barriers to entry.
None of the Vietnamese Wikipedia's bot operators are interested in inflating our article count for the sake of. We care deeply about the future of our wiki and the health of its community, and we welcome feedback from the community at large.