Hoi,
These are tired arguments and they are not universally shared. They do, and that is the worst part of it, not provide any strategy to providing more information to our readers. If you are interested in what you can do to attract more readers, then you need to analyse what people are actually reading. This gives you a clue on where you should make the most efforts in order to increase the number of readers.

Experience in other languages learns that people are most interested in three things (in no special order) sex, sport and news. As Wikipedia is not really about all three, what you can do is write background articles to sports events or to the news. When for instance the Three Gorges Dam in China is in the news, write about it, the Yangtze, China, whatever aspect you have not touched yet of the aricle or just extend the article, when India plays Britain in the Oval, write an article about the stadium, the city it is in etc. When you do this consequently for some time, you will find that your coverage of the news, sports is increasing and the number of readers increases as a result.

An other strategy to make people more at home is by making sure that the user interface is localised. I am really happy that the localisation for several Indian languages is being worked on in BetaWiki. Surprising is that so few people have indicated to be interested in the bounty. Is thisbecause they have not signaled their intend to do so.. ?

Ok these are two constructive strategies to get more readers. They come at a cost; you will have to work on content that is likely to get readers in stead of working on your favourite subject. With more readers you are likely to get more people who accidentally hit the "edit" button... Please be nice to them, be courteous and by doing this, you are implemented a third strategy :) because more editors leads to more content and more readers.

Thanks,
    GerardM


On Jan 19, 2008 10:44 AM, Shiju Alex <shijualexonline@gmail.com> wrote:
As Kolhapuri had pointed out we need some postive discussion on this topic.
 
1> Indian language Wikipedias don't have enough quality articles.
 
 
Indian language wikipedias have quality articles. I was just pointing to some of the strategies adopted by some Indian wikies to increase the article count.
 
Creating new articles using bots, or creating thousands and thousands of short pages as I have pointed out earlier, or copying content from english wiki  will eventualy lose the quality of the wiki. More over it will not motivate a new user to become a wiki editor.
 
Another disadvantage us it will not attract the readers. If the wiki that we are creating is not helping a user to find the required information and we are still redirecting the user to english wiki then there is some thing wrong.
 
Most of us need to read the below policies:
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:There_is_no_deadline
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:The_world_will_not_end_tomorrow
 
 
More Later
Regards
Shiju Alex
http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Shijualex
 
 
On 1/16/08, Kolhapuri <ppdixit+wiki@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi,
     I think we should take whatever has been written in the two mails below positively.
We don't need to pinpoint bad things about other language wikipedias at this stage while this group is just in formation stage.

1> Indian language Wikipedias don't have enough quality articles.
2> We need more contributors to add more quality articles.
3> To attract people to Wikipedias we need a valuable information to be already present in them.
     Now how do we do this?
    If you have some ideas that might work in Indian scenario please share them, especially if you have seen them working on your Wikipedia.
 
e.g  Shiju Alex can tell us how ml wikipedia has been able to achieve so many registered users?

Regards,
kolhapuri
mr.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:कोल्हापुरी


On Jan 16, 2008 9:52 AM, Shiju Alex < shijualexonline@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi,
 
I am from Malayalam Wikipedia. Since you have mentioned about Malyalam wikipedia I would like to discuss some thing about the article count race (Indian language wikipedias in particular).
 
 
 
for the sake of increasing the number of articles in a wiki will not increase the quality of a wikipedia or will not do any thing good for the language also.
 
If we would have adopted one of the above techiques we would have been well ahead in the number of articles, since malayalam wikipedia has the maximum number of registered users among all the indian language wikipedias (More than 4400).
 
Please go through the various quality parameters listed in http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias , for an understanding about various indian langauage wikipedias.
 
 
Regards
 
Shiju Alex
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
On 1/15/08, Mahitgar from Marathi Wikipedia < mahitgar@yahoo.co.in > wrote:

It is quite ununderstandable why Wikipedias like Kannada Language wikipedia and Gujrathi and Malyalam language wikipedia are so slow given the fact that literacy levels and IT exposure in respective states is quite OK and they are immensely contributing to India centric articles on English wikipedia in big way.

 

Important regional Languages Assamese ,Oriya , Punjabi  wikipedias are lagging behind like nothing.

 

Besides we need to look after now sort of extinct but important old languages wikipedias Sanskrit and Pali

 

Main chalange is not how to increase their article or edit count but statisticaly self sustainable website service has to achieve  menimum 3000 membership mark from respective languages so website keeps getting adequate content and how do we do that?

 

Thanks and Regards

Mahitgar

 

  


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