Heema Khan wrote:
On Urdu Wikipedia, article on Israel is very short: http://ur.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%A7%D8%B3%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%A6%DB%8C%D9%84 I can translate it:
While the text is very short and not very well-written, one must bear in mind that ur.wikipedia.org has a total of 1490 articles and that every language of Wikipedia had short and bad articles at that early stage. After submitting an article to such a small and young wiki site, the main frustration is not spelling errors, factual errors, slanted point of view or poor organization, but the fact that all wikilinks are red and not blue. (In the case of ur:Israel, there are no links in the main wikitext, so the article still needs to be wikified.) The main "WikiProjects" at that stage are typically to establish stubs for every country of the world and for every day in the calendar. At around 10 or 20 thousand articles, the WikiProjects are the years in the calendar and taxonomies for all mammals and birds. At between 50 and 100 thousand articles, newspapers begin to write comparisons between Wikipedia and traditional printed encyclopedias in the same language.
Somewhere along the road, adhering to NPOV and phasing out stubs becomes more of a concern. But it would probably miss the target to make a big fuzz about the Urdu Wikipedia's viewpoint on Israel (or other controversial topics) at this early stage. And I think the same goes for this fuzz about the sitenotice. You don't need to call the fire brigade to put out a single candle. And this time, the house is not really on fire.
If you speak Urdu (which I don't), by all means, help to improve the articles, and help to write more stubs. After 10,000 articles are created, start a WikiProject to identify and weed out stubs. But just like a gardener, you cannot start weeding before the crop has started to grow.
The Swedish Wikipedia was initially very enthusiastic about the chance to copy articles from an old out-of-copyright encyclopedia (very similar to the 1911 Britannica). It took quite some time before the problems became apparent: Negroes were described as an inferior race, almost like animals, and old Swedish kings were attributed god-like virtues. You can't really write that today. Fortunately, this sorted itself out long before the newspapers started to compare the Swedish Wikipedia to contemporary printed encyclopedias.