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 तेंडुलकरhttps://mail.google.com/wiki/%E0%A4%B8%E0%A4%9A%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%A8_%E0%A4%A4%E0%A5%87%E0%A4%82%E0%A4%A1%E0%A5%81%E0%A4%B2%E0%A4%95%E0%A4%B0हा 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%...
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
I think you need to have a look at Hindi and Nepal basha (newari) wikipedias also.
Some time back (2 years before) I pointed out this issue in this mailing list itself. ( http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2008-January/000092.ht... )
All the top 5 language wikipedias that I mentioned in this statistical report http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B4hBi4hJ-5mnZmMxYzFhNTYtZWU5Yy00ZTAwLTliZDItMWJiZGI5MGUxZGQ2&hl=enare following the same strategy to increase the article count. It is really sad to see that even Hindi wikipedia, which has the maximum user base among all the other Indian languages, is also following this same method to increase the article count. (Hindi wikipedia was having 30,000 artcles on June 2009. But now it has more than 50,000. But the active users in that wiki is still less than that of Tamil or Malayalam wiki.
We can easily make out the quality of the articles in a wiki if you look at the parameters *bytes per article* and *articles with size more than 2000 bytes*.
The fact that all these thousands (or ten thousands) of one-liners are created by one or two admins (or some bots) of that wikipedia is really alarming. The very purpose of wiki software and collaborative authoring fail there. These type of users are killing their wiki projects and *prevent any potential new users* to start editing in that wiki.
Readers will not get any benefit from these type of wikis. They still need to go to English wiki for some good/fruit information about any topic.
Shiju
On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 12:00 PM, YellowMonkey blnguyen2230@gmail.comwrote:
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 तेंडुलकरhttps://mail.google.com/wiki/%E0%A4%B8%E0%A4%9A%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%A8_%E0%A4%A4%E0%A5%87%E0%A4%82%E0%A4%A1%E0%A5%81%E0%A4%B2%E0%A4%95%E0%A4%B0हा 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%...
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
Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
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%...
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
Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
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%...
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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My 2 ( or more ) paisa on this !
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.comwrote:
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 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%...
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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