On Thursday 27 January 2011 10:31 AM, Ravishankar wrote:
Its not just about stubs.
We have users in Tamil Wikipedia who bulk upload 100s of complete
articles they wrote offline with just one edit per article. One
great article can be uploaded in one click and one mediocre
article can have 100s of edits.
According to
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias
"Depths above 300 for Wikipedias below 100 000
articles have been automatically dismissed as irrelevant."
When we focus on number of articles, some
end up creating useless stubs. The same should not happen when
we focus on edit counts.
Ravi
This may be nothing related to original thread. Sorry. Malayalam
wikipedia has its strength and its weakness.
Depth is just an indicator of collaborative character of editors.
For a massive multiauthor collaboration site, some measurement
mechanism is better than none. But I don't think large number of
edits are bad. If anyone thinks that articel by single edit is
better than multi edited article, I must say thats not wiki style :(
.
But there is an another issue, number of bot edits. Many ml users,
mainly students, like to play with bots. Malayalam Wikipedia has
never discouraged anyone for testing their bots (if their edits are
okay), because user satisfaction is also a Wikipedia goal. We know
that eventually they will create a great bot :). Sometimes running
a bot is not very simple. I had a spell checker bot and I had to
overview all of its edits, because of Malayalam's ligatures and
grammatical rules [or may be because bad logic ;-)]. Even after
running couple of months, it threw exceptions. So I'll say bot edits
also are a kind of manual inputs. Now there are many global bots,
most of them contributing interwiki. Bot conflict and bot-edit-war
occurs occasionally which we usually avoided by protecting the page
or by noticing the owner (Recent eg:
See
history of വർഗ്ഗം:ഫലകങ്ങൾ).
Malayalam Wikipedia is a small wiki, just over 16000 pages on main
namespace, so it is easy to exaggerate bot contribution. But
actually it is not, whenever a bot identified as doing unwanted
edit it gets blocked.
There are many wiki-projects which always engage users to do
something on wiki. So whenever a user find an error, even it is the
minute one, he/she corrects it. Nobody waits for large content to
edit. Many portal (കവാടം) pages are there, which helps users to find
their favourite topic.
In ml.wp - many pages in category namespace (there is an active
categorization wiki-project, which keeps articles finely
categorized), large number of templates and many help pages and
project pages with good content (I'm sure that many of these help
pages and project pages are really useful to new users to jump start
wikipedia) are available. I think we are using talk pages aslo very
well.
It is clear from depth formula, that all these factors can be
incremental to "depth". So if anybody believes that Malayalam
Wikipedia is irrelevant, I welcome them to there to check its
irrelevancy and contribute their home wikii until it become
irrelevant like Malayalam Wikipedia. :)