Wikipedia-l May 2007

wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

48 participants
35 discussions

Big ... bigger ... the biggest ... encyclopaedic articles ... (was quantity vs. quality)
by Sabine Cretella 04 May '07

04 May '07

Just forwarding you what I wrote on my blog about this theme ... Ciao, Sabine -------- Original-Nachricht -------- I already wrote about this some time ago ... it is the never ending struggle and fight between two worlds: - any length is fine, also just one sentence because this sentence gives basic information - only long articles are good Uhmmm ... well: I would like to invite you to come into a book store <http://amazon.com/Encyclopedias-Reference-Books/b/ref=amb_link_10/002-95140…> ... wow ... more than 29000 entries there. You find anything there ... general encyclopaedias in just one volume and many of the entries have a lengths of just one sentence (like: Maiori is a city in the South of Italy, on the Amalfi Coast, in the province of Salerno, region Campania). There are specialised encyclopaedias with very specific articles let's take an example, maybe about biology. There are the really big ones like the Britannica. Now each of them has a certain kind of target audience. What is Wikipedia's audience? The general reader that could be happy enough with knowing that Maiori is a town in Italy, the highly specialised one that want to know all about a specific animal we maybe don't all know or those who want to read those huge articles? Who is our audience? All of them or just the "elite" of encyclopaedia readers that would say that one sentence about a town somewhere in the world is not enough? Uhmmm ... but what is Wikipedia's basic scope: "Provision of information in the field of general encyclopedic knowledge via the Internet." (I am quoting from the article about Wikipedia <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia> on the English wikipedia). Reading that and considering what a wiki is: all discussions about what is better, best, worse, worst etc. don't need to be discussed. If we are NPOV all of these versions are equally valuable and Wikipedia having its unique goal and being a wiki can combine all three of them in one. Isn't that incredible? So why limit what can be added? Even a small sentence can be of value ... and even a town or place that seems to be irrelevant to one can be relevant to somebody else. Who are we to say (just as an example): this city or river may not go into wikipedia as a stub since it is not relevant enough ... who tells us what is relevant or not? Wouldn't it be against the NPOV policy? Oh yes, now I hear some shouting: but there are then 5000 articles about cities that are just stubs and the wikipedia seems to be bigger as it is ... well: go to the library, take one of those general encyclopaedias and look into it ... remember: for a kid one sentence telling where a city is often is enough - if there is more: even better, but that sentence can be a huge help when they study. Imagine one thing, at the moment I am writing I don't have a clue on how many articles there are on nap.wikipedia ... I never really cared about numbers ... you don't believe it? Ask people who know me ... I simply don't look at that stuff. I contribute to wikis because I like to do it - it is irrellevant where and what and when. It is irrelevant how many edits I do ... I don't know how many there are around of mine. What counts is that we do what we do because we love to do it. I repeat: each article, even of only one sentence can be of high value for somebody searching for information ... don't exclude the small ones, please and stop counting numbers ... it will help you a lot. We are not in competition - we are co-operating projects, that's all there is to it. -- Posted By Sabine Cretella to words & more <http://sabinecretella.blogspot.com/2007/05/big-bigger-biggest-encyclopaedic…> at 5/03/2007 10:06:00 PM

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Re: [Wikipedia-l] Quality vs Quantity
by Craig Franklin 03 May '07

03 May '07

Hi, You show me a way of quantitatively comparing two Wikis using an automated process, and I'll show you a language or Wiki that will break it. Cheers, Craig Franklin > Message: 10 > Date: Thu, 3 May 2007 08:02:17 +0200 (CEST) > From: Lars Aronsson <lars(a)aronsson.se> > Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Quality vs Quantity > To: wikipedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0705030758430.12001(a)localhost.localdomain> > Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII > > Berto 'd Sera wrote: > > > 100% true. Just compound words in german may make a great > > difference towards English, in piemontese we thousands of 'L L' > > n' 'n that would count as words and are but pronominal > > particles, plus we usually say everything twice (double subject, > > double locatives, etc). > > The size of the compressed article dumps would be a better > comparison then, because the same content would still occupy the > same space after all redundancies have been removed. > >

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Asosiy:-prefix at wikiuz_p
by Ros’ Haruo 02 May '07

02 May '07

Why do the interwiki links in the Uzbek Wikipedia, and the article titles at their list of Newpages, all have "Asosiy:" prefixed so that they point to nonexistent pages and one has to manually remove the "Asosiy:" and reload to get to the page the link ŝould have taken you to? I have asked this various places in various ways and so far no one has either explained the reason for the defect or corrected it. Haruo

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New Pew Internet report: 36% of Americans consult Wikipedia
by phoebe ayers 01 May '07

01 May '07

Maybe not news, considering our traffic rankings.... but this is one of the first "real" studies of Wikipedia use I've seen, conducted by the prestigious Pew Internet project and released in April 2007 in a "data memo". http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Wikipedia07.pdf The first few paragraphs: " More than a third of American adult internet users (36%) consult the citizen-generated online encyclopedia Wikipedia, according to a new nationwide survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. And on a typical day in the winter of 2007, 8% of online Americans consulted Wikipedia. There has been ongoing controversy about the reliability of articles on Wikipedia. Still, the Pew Internet Project survey shows that Wikipedia is far more popular among the well-educated than it is among those with lower levels of education. For instance, 50% of those with at least a college degree consult the site, compared with 22% of those with a high school diploma. And 46% of those age 18 and older who are current full- or part-time students have used Wikipedia, compared with 36% of the overall internet population. In addition, young adults and broadband users have been among those who are earlier adopters of Wikipedia. While 44% of those ages 18-29 use Wikipedia to look for information, just 29% of users age 50 and older consult the site. In a similar split, 42% of home broadband users look for information on Wikipedia, while just 26% of home dial-up users do so."

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Account password restrictions changed
by Brion Vibber 01 May '07

01 May '07

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Due to an attacker mass-abusing accounts with weak passwords, passwords that are the same as the username can no longer be used. Affected accounts can reset their password by e-mail to something more secure. Please report the change back to your various communities in case someone needs help... - -- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2.2 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFGMSBWwRnhpk1wk44RAlqBAJoC6YMCK5qYfYhcyMWZPzh2XDLmOwCfQje3 lyq4jSE9wP+NrIBkDeomckg= =oHa1 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Wikipedia-l May 2007