IMHO, if articles are deleted just because it is a stub in wikipedia , it would have never grown ! Try to add more meaningful content to those articles, instead of recommending it to deletion. Improvement of any article, is everybody's responsibility, not only to the one who had created it.

Imagine somebody writes a non-existent article "India", a stub one in a newly created language Wikipedia. Should they delete it ? No ! We are defeating the very purpose of collaborative online encyclopedia. Deleting them will also confirm the long standing criticism of Wikipedia - Editor elitism and unwelcoming behaviour to newcomers. Having said that, I am completely against any spam content on Wikipedia. Also no information is better than wrong data. Creating articles to just inflate the numbers is gaming the system, but creating article stubs to improve coverage should be always be welcomed.

Readers are more likely to not return to a language Wikipedia if they find there is not even basic coverage on wide range of subjects. Trust me!

What I have seen on my experiences on en.wiki, people are more happy to edit existing articles than creating new ones. A new editor will expand an article of his/her interest , if there is already an article. 90% of them won't bother to create one himself.

Again, I must iterate this , Creating articles to just inflate the numbers is bad, but creating article stubs to improve coverage should be always be welcomed.

Ok, no brick-bats for this, I'm just sharing my personal opinion. :D

Regards

Tinu Cherian

On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 8:07 PM, Praveen Prakash <me.praveen@gmail.com> wrote:

Kolhapuri wrote:

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@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

Thats true. In Malayalam wikipedia we once faced same problem. But It get worse when nobody except that particular writer is happy. We overcome this by putting a tag on such article that denotes "this article is too stub or single line" and we keep it for some weeks. If there is no improvements on contents, we recommend that article for deletion. So now most of our articles are with atleast basic infos.

I can surely say that some users want to start so many articles, only to say that they started it. ;-)

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