Hi
In pl wiki "depth" is very weak. We have many edits, like other bigger Wikipedias, but Ratio is problematical (Non-Articles/Articles). We have not a lot of non-article pages. Could you help us? Any ideas?
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Non-Articles/Articles
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesArticlesEditsPerArticle.htm
http://s23.org/wikistats/wikipedias_html.php?sort=good_desc
http://pl.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Specjalna%3ANowe_strony&namesp...
Przykuta
*Dzień dobry, *Przykuta
One of Wikipedia perennial dilemmas is quantity vs. quality. Low depth and low articles to non-auricles ratio usually a sign that too many articles were created semiautomatically, by bots and the community is spread too thin e.g. there is not enough people to correct and discuss these articles.
Therefore, the first possible thing to do is to stop increasing the number of bot articles - at the stage of development of Polish Wikipedia they do more harm than good.
You can also have an "X week" where X is any topic of articles created by bots. People like to work together on a common goal, in the Russian Wikipedia thematic weeks are very successful.
And lastly you can start nominating articles created by bots and not touched by a human hand since then for deletion. They will be either improved or deleted and any outcome will increase average depth. In RuWiki nobody tries to nominate significant bot articles like German cities but superfluous ones about obscure 70s C-movies and far far away galaxies NGO... are nominated for deletion 5 per day.
I hope this helps.
Regards
Victoria
On Sun, Oct 10, 2010 at 6:54 AM, Przykuta przykuta@o2.pl wrote:
Hi
In pl wiki "depth" is very weak. We have many edits, like other bigger Wikipedias, but Ratio is problematical (Non-Articles/Articles). We have not a lot of non-article pages. Could you help us? Any ideas?
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Non-Articles/Articles
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesArticlesEditsPerArticle.htm
http://s23.org/wikistats/wikipedias_html.php?sort=good_desc
http://pl.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Specjalna%3ANowe_strony&namesp...
Przykuta
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
*Dzień dobry, *Przykuta
One of Wikipedia perennial dilemmas is quantity vs. quality. Low depth and low articles to non-auricles ratio usually a sign that too many articles were created semiautomatically, by bots and the community is spread too thin e.g. there is not enough people to correct and discuss these articles.
Therefore, the first possible thing to do is to stop increasing the number of bot articles - at the stage of development of Polish Wikipedia they do more harm than good.
Huh. We did not create articles by bots (from 2007) we create thousends of articles in these years and depth has been still weak.
Przykuta
2010/10/10 Виктория mstislavl1@gmail.com:
*Dzień dobry, *Przykuta
One of Wikipedia perennial dilemmas is quantity vs. quality. Low depth and low articles to non-auricles ratio usually a sign that too many articles were created semiautomatically, by bots and the community is spread too thin e.g. there is not enough people to correct and discuss these articles.
Polish doesn't seem to have more bots *editing* than other projects do. A few months back, I graphed all the Wikipedias by number of bot edits as proportion of total edits:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Proportion_of_bot_edits_on_Wikipedia_...
Polish isn't marked here, but it's eighth from the right - it doesn't seem to be a statistical outlier at all. Unless the bots are concentrated solely on new articles, which is a possibility, this seems normal.
So perhaps it's something about the way the Polish Wikipedia works? A few thoughts:
* Polish doesn't host any images - unlike most other projects - so there's no need for image pages, image talkpages, etc. On some projects, such as German, as many as 6% of pages are in the image namespace!
* Polish doesn't seem to use article talkpages much. I've just spent some time hitting "Losuj artykuł", and about 10-20% of the articles I found had talkpages. In English, this is about 85-90%, and in French, about the same. In the other languages these may just have project tags ("this article is part of WikiProject Something") or metadata ("this article is rated C-class and needs an image"), but they still show up as non-article pages. There's currently ~735,000 articles and ~595,000 non-articles; if another 70% of articles were to have talkpages - making it comparable with English and French - this would make ~1,110,000 non-articles, or 1.5 non-articles per article.
* Finally, Polish Wikipedia has fewer active users than any of the next three "smaller" Wikipedias - Italian, Japanese and Spanish - which might be significant here. Fewer users talk less, so there's fewer "natural" discussion pages.
You can also have an "X week" where X is any topic of articles created by bots. People like to work together on a common goal, in the Russian Wikipedia thematic weeks are very successful.
English Wikipedia has had some success with a "cup" system - a hundred Wikipedians competing over several months to improve articles, etc. It's hard to say how much impact it's had, or how much work people would have done *without* the contest, but I've seen estimates that a quarter or a third of all highly-rated content over the last year has come from participants. In some cases, it was so popular it overwhelmed the review processes!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiCup
I've not participated in theme weeks before, but I've heard pretty good things about them. Were they usually focused on creating articles or on "saving" existing ones?
And lastly you can start nominating articles created by bots and not touched by a human hand since then for deletion. They will be either improved or deleted and any outcome will increase average depth. In RuWiki nobody tries to nominate significant bot articles like German cities but superfluous ones about obscure 70s C-movies and far far away galaxies NGO... are nominated for deletion 5 per day.
Harsh but fair!
How strict is the bot-approval process on Polish Wikipedia? If there's a problem with mass creation of articles, you could try being stricter about requiring community approval before the bots are allowed to run, to check that you actually do want these topics.
So perhaps it's something about the way the Polish Wikipedia works? A few thoughts:
- Polish doesn't host any images - unlike most other projects - so
there's no need for image pages, image talkpages, etc. On some projects, such as German, as many as 6% of pages are in the image namespace!
Yes. We sent all images to Commons. We finished this work last month.
- Polish doesn't seem to use article talkpages much. I've just spent
some time hitting "Losuj artykuł", and about 10-20% of the articles I found had talkpages. In English, this is about 85-90%, and in French, about the same. In the other languages these may just have project tags ("this article is part of WikiProject Something") or metadata ("this article is rated C-class and needs an image"), but they still show up as non-article pages. There's currently ~735,000 articles and ~595,000 non-articles; if another 70% of articles were to have talkpages - making it comparable with English and French - this would make ~1,110,000 non-articles, or 1.5 non-articles per article.
Readers who find errors use "Zgłoś błąd" (notify an error) in menu (sidebar) rather than talk pages.
~1500 edits by month (notifies and answers): http://vs.aka-online.de/cgi-bin/wppagehiststat.pl?lang=pl.wikipedia&page...
Old talk pages with solved problems are deleted. Talk pages of dynamic IP are deleted too (we wait ~6 months and delete them by bot). I don't know - is it standard behavior in other Wikiepdias or specific for pl.
- Finally, Polish Wikipedia has fewer active users than any of the
next three "smaller" Wikipedias - Italian, Japanese and Spanish - which might be significant here. Fewer users talk less, so there's fewer "natural" discussion pages.
True - we have only ~300 very active users. We rather use main. One of the most often used slogan is "we work here, not talk". Many times we spend in "flagged revisions" - so, we are sure, that 90% are free of vandalism.
Przykuta
Przykuta, 10/10/2010 19:17:
Old talk pages with solved problems are deleted.
This is extremely strange. Talk pages are part of the article history. Ortega's thesis should be updated, perhaps. «The combination of a very active cohort of bots, together with the very low ratio of talk pages, indicates that the Polish language version is not following the same organizational pattern found in other language editions. Such a low ratio of talk pages points out the little effort undertaken on coordination actions and discussion about article contents in the Polish version.» (http://libresoft.es/Members/jfelipe/phd-thesis , p. 91)
Talk pages of dynamic IP are deleted too (we wait ~6 months and delete them by bot). I don't know - is it standard behavior in other Wikiepdias or specific for pl.
This isn't very relevant. On it.wiki they used to be deleted by (unapproved) bots (run under sysop accounts); since some years they're just replaced with a "welcome IP" template every month if they're more than a month old.
- Finally, Polish Wikipedia has fewer active users than any of the
next three "smaller" Wikipedias - Italian, Japanese and Spanish - which might be significant here. Fewer users talk less, so there's fewer "natural" discussion pages.
True - we have only ~300 very active users. We rather use main. One of the most often used slogan is "we work here, not talk". Many times we spend in "flagged revisions" - so, we are sure, that 90% are free of vandalism.
This is very important. The real question is: how can pl.wiki be so big (and useful, looking at pageviews) with such a little editor base? Seems a good result.
Nemo
Old talk pages with solved problems are deleted.
This is extremely strange. Talk pages are part of the article history. Ortega's thesis should be updated, perhaps. «The combination of a very active cohort of bots, together with the very low ratio of talk pages, indicates that the Polish language version is not following the same organizational pattern found in other language editions. Such a low ratio of talk pages points out the little effort undertaken on coordination actions and discussion about article contents in the Polish version.» (http://libresoft.es/Members/jfelipe/phd-thesis , p. 91)
Delete reasons for talk pages: http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Deletereason-dropdown
* Wpis nie związany w żaden sposób z treścią hasła (it is not abount content of article) * Szablon Bez infoboksu – wstawiony (lack of infobox - done) * Szablon Wikiprojekt info - Wikiproject info * Strona dyskusji to nie forum - this is not a forum * Sprawa załatwiona / zbędna dyskusja - done (problem solved) * Dyskusja bez artykułu - talk page without article * Dyskusja przeniesiona - moved * Odpowiedziano na stronie dyskusji użytkownika - an answer is on the user talk page * Opis użycia szablonu przeniesiono na stronę dokumentacji - documentation of template moved
Delete log:
http://pl.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Specjalna%3ARejestr&type=delet...
Of course pages with big discussions are not deleted. There are deleted rather simply suggestions: "you have an error with birth date", "I don't like this person", "This page need infobox" etc. So, quality is poor because talk pages are cleaning and there is used specific link for notify errors in sidebar. Yes, strange :)
przykuta
--- El dom, 10/10/10, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com escribió:
De: Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com Asunto: Re: [Wiki-research-l] [Foundation-l] How to improve quality of Wikipedia? Para: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org CC: "Research into Wikimedia content and communities" wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Fecha: domingo, 10 de octubre, 2010 19:45 Przykuta, 10/10/2010 19:17:
Old talk pages with solved problems are deleted.
This is extremely strange. Talk pages are part of the article history. Ortega's thesis should be updated, perhaps. «The combination of a very active cohort of bots, together with the very low ratio of talk pages, indicates that the Polish language version is not following the same organizational pattern found in other language editions. Such a low ratio of talk pages points out the little effort undertaken on coordination actions and discussion about article contents in the Polish version.» (http://libresoft.es/Members/jfelipe/phd-thesis , p. 91)
Thanks for pointing out this, Nemo. I might have missed the thread in Foundation-l otherwise :).
Well, at least this gives a partial explanation for the very low ratio of available talk pages, though I personally think it is not enough to explain such a really really low figure.
In fact, I concur that this is very strange. As far as I have understood up to now, talk pages also serve as a backup log of past discussions for new users approaching an article for the first time. If this is true, then in PL some new editor of an article might run the risk of raising again a issue or a contribution that was already discussed a year ago by editors working on that article.
Best, Felipe.
Talk pages of dynamic IP are deleted too (we wait ~6
months and delete them by bot). I don't know - is it standard behavior in other Wikiepdias or specific for pl.
This isn't very relevant. On it.wiki they used to be deleted by (unapproved) bots (run under sysop accounts); since some years they're just replaced with a "welcome IP" template every month if they're more than a month old.
- Finally, Polish Wikipedia has fewer active users
than any of the
next three "smaller" Wikipedias - Italian,
Japanese and Spanish -
which might be significant here. Fewer users talk
less, so there's
fewer "natural" discussion pages.
True - we have only ~300 very active users. We rather
use main. One of the most often used slogan is "we work here, not talk". Many times we spend in "flagged revisions"
- so, we are sure, that 90% are free of vandalism.
This is very important. The real question is: how can pl.wiki be so big (and useful, looking at pageviews) with such a little editor base? Seems a good result.
Nemo
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Czesc all,
On 10 Oct 2010, at 06:54, Przykuta wrote:
Hi
In pl wiki "depth" is very weak. We have many edits, like other bigger Wikipedias, but Ratio is problematical (Non-Articles/Articles). We have not a lot of non-article pages. Could you help us? Any ideas?
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Non-Articles/Articles
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesArticlesEditsPerArticle.htm
http://s23.org/wikistats/wikipedias_html.php?sort=good_desc
http://pl.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Specjalna%3ANowe_strony&namesp...
Przykuta
It's a bit ambiguous as to whether this is <number of non-article edits/non-articles> over <article edits/non-article edits> (or even the number of articles vs. number of non-articles), but I'll assume the first one of these.
Is this actually a symptom of a problem? It could even be viewed as the absence of a problem. One of en.wp's problems can be over-discussing something before it is carried out in article space, which can be seen by the extremely high number of edits to the talk pages compared to the content pages. Having a minimal amount of discussion per article can be seen as an efficient way of creating articles. However, it could also be seen as people not wanting to challenge the content of an article in a critical way, which might be more of a downside - a reasonable level of debate/controversy about articles tends to be productive in producing a balanced article on the subject
I think image discussion is somewhat of a red herring/off topic discussion, as I'm not sure that there is much discussion that actually happens around individual images. The same applies to bot article edits, if these only make small numbers of edits.
Does pl.wp have WikiProjects? If not, then perhaps this could explain the reduced number of non-article edits, given how many pages on en.wp only have wikiproject templates on their talk pages (or cases where having a non-redlink has promoted discussions).
Thanks, Mike Peel
P.S. I wish that en.wp sent all images to Commons - it would ease a lot of issues. ;-)
Does pl.wp have WikiProjects? If not, then perhaps this could explain the reduced number of non-article edits, given how many pages on en.wp only have wikiproject templates on their talk pages (or cases where having a non-redlink has promoted discussions).
Thanks, Mike Peel
Sure, like other ~ 50 Wikipedias ;)
http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikiprojekt
But we not used templates in talk pages (only several projets). Wikipedians in pl don't like "empty editcounting".
przykuta
I am not sure that deleting disccusion pages as a default is a good thing. If the discussion page exists some people will check it out of curosity and stay on the site longer, may be add their comments. "Red" scares many users, they don't know how to create a new page. Of course "I don't like this person" won't do but if there was a mistake they will see that the mistake is corrected so there's a possibility of the feedback.
The Russian Wikipedia has copied your Mistakes report script but we often transfer the reports to the discussion pages for correction of wikipedians looking after their articles.
Victoria
The Russian Wikipedia has copied your Mistakes report script but we often transfer the reports to the discussion pages for correction of wikipedians looking after their articles.
Victoria
In pl wiki reports are moved too, but only if problem is not solved on the "Zgłoś błąd" site. Sometimes we transfer problems to wikiprojects.
BTW - I've seen, that in some (smaller) Wikipedias newbies are welcome by bots. We try welcome only users with any activity and newbies are welcome by [[MediaWiki:Welcomecreation]] page with links to help pages.
Thx Victoria for info about "special actions" in ru wiki. I know them, we create some actions too, but "cup system" after huge WikiRPG in 2006 is closed. Too much fights.
przykuta
Przykuta, 11/10/2010 08:37:
BTW - I've seen, that in some (smaller) Wikipedias newbies are welcome by bots. We try welcome only users with any activity and newbies are welcome by [[MediaWiki:Welcomecreation]] page with links to help pages.
[[MediaWiki:Welcomecreation]] is almost useless, IMHO: you can't read it again after account creation. Welcome on talk page is useful because the user can read hints when he wants (I appreciated this a lot when I was a newbie) and because it offers help from another user (simplest form of coaching/mentoring). Bots are ok, even if someone is worried about disk space (when substituting) or job queue (when leaving a template). Welcoming inactive users may be useful because 1) lots of users get lost and don't edit even if they would to, and some hint may encourage them, 2) usually bots won't re-check activity of older accounts and you may end up with lots of not welcomed users. Default configuration of welcome.py is to welcome every non-automatically created (SUL) account, if I remember correctly. Recently some wikis have started to use http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:NewUserMessage
Nemo
Przykuta, 11/10/2010 08:37:
BTW - I've seen, that in some (smaller) Wikipedias newbies are welcome by bots. We try welcome only users with any activity and newbies are welcome by [[MediaWiki:Welcomecreation]] page with links to help pages.
[[MediaWiki:Welcomecreation]] is almost useless, IMHO: you can't read it again after account creation. Welcome on talk page is useful because the user can read hints when he wants (I appreciated this a lot when I was a newbie) and because it offers help from another user (simplest form of coaching/mentoring). Bots are ok, even if someone is worried about disk space (when substituting) or job queue (when leaving a template). Welcoming inactive users may be useful because 1) lots of users get lost and don't edit even if they would to, and some hint may encourage them, 2) usually bots won't re-check activity of older accounts and you may end up with lots of not welcomed users. Default configuration of welcome.py is to welcome every non-automatically created (SUL) account, if I remember correctly. Recently some wikis have started to use http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:NewUserMessage
Nemo
Huh. Yes, but when bot welcome newbie, "he" can't help this user. If I welcome, I offer my personal help. We welcome all if they are active:
http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specjalna:Wk%C5%82ad/newbies
But... welcome by bot + link to "Adopt-a-User" page. Hmm. I will think about this. In welcomecreation is a link to this tutorial:
http://pl.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Krok_pierwszy_-_edytowan...
przykuta
Przykuta, 11/10/2010 09:27:
Huh. Yes, but when bot welcome newbie, "he" can't help this user.
Bots usually add a random signature from a list of experienced users willing to help.
Nemo
Hello,
This whole thread is interesting. You can work side by side with someone for several years and not know that the Wikipedia next door delete talk pages where the question is resolved.
Anyway, I published an essay about raising quality on the Swedish Wikipedia a couple of years ago, which may have some bearing on this issue. It was written in Swedish but since most of you don't speak Swedish, it was translated into English here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Sverige/Lennart_thoughts_of_Quality
Another essay, this time about users, can be read here (Google translated only so far):
http://translate.google.se/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=sv&ie=UTF-8...
Best wishes,
Lennart
2010/10/11 Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com
Przykuta, 11/10/2010 09:27:
Huh. Yes, but when bot welcome newbie, "he" can't help this user.
Bots usually add a random signature from a list of experienced users willing to help.
Nemo
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Hello,
This whole thread is interesting. You can work side by side with someone for several years and not know that the Wikipedia next door delete talk pages where the question is resolved.
Yeah. We are forks.
Anyway, I published an essay about raising quality on the Swedish Wikipedia a couple of years ago, which may have some bearing on this issue. It was written in Swedish but since most of you don't speak Swedish, it was translated into English here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Sverige/Lennart_thoughts_of_Quality
Another essay, this time about users, can be read here (Google translated only so far):
http://translate.google.se/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=sv&ie=UTF-8...
Best wishes,
Lennart
Thx, I will send this link to pl community (I hope - part of the global wikicommunity yet).
przykuta
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org