Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Indian Wikipedias and various stats

Praveen, You've shown how much insight we can glean by provoking Malayalam Wiki friends. ;) We all got a great inside view of the different aspects of participation in one of the finest Indian wikis. them to there to check its irrelevancy and contribute their home I don't think anyone doubted that. - Sundar "That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought, is a truth generally admitted." - George Boole, quoted in Iverson's Turing Award Lecture *From:* praveenp &lt;me.praveen(a)gmail.com&gt; *To:* Discussion list on Indian language projects of Wikimedia. < wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; *Sent:* Thu, January 27, 2011 5:58:25 PM *Subject:* Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Malayalam wikipedia crossed the 10 Lakh/1 million edits milestone 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<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias#Notes>be… 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<http://ml.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%E0%B4%B5%E0%B5…)story>). 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. :)