19k articles is huge. It is more than decent. It makes zh a usable encyclopedic resource with only a few omissions in normal browsing.
With all due respect, 19k is huge because Wikipedias which actually celebrate breaking 300 or 500 are so much smaller, even Wikipedias which celebrate breaking 1k or 5k or even 10k are a great deal smaller and yet can sometimes be useful.
Your only giving actual figures for "very active" Wikipedians is also selective spin. "Active" Wikipedians are obviously much higher in number and are what makes zh.wikipedia a community rather than a closed group of friends.
You try to make it sound as if zh.wikipedia is devoid of all life except for the lone Wikipedian here and there - that's ridiculous.
If neither you, nor Yacht, nor Mountain, nor Shizhao, nor any of the other important figureheads are planning to defect to a fangyan-pedia, there's probably not much to worry about - that means that a minimal amount of "lesser" users will move rather than a significant one. (and again, I believe that especially with Wu the situation would be similar to that between hi: and kn:)
Nishishei is the head of a slowly growing online BBS about "zanhe-ëwo", so if he starts alone he wil surely find other users easily (this is how scn.wikipedia reached its present state - I motivated one person and he motivated everybody else)
If Nishishei really wants to work on a Wu Wikipedia, and he can draw other editors/readers, then why do you want to redirect his efforts to zh.wikipedia? That's a bit selfish.
Mark
On Fri, 28 Jan 2005 15:11:49 +0800, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 21:27:58 -0700, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
People like you are far too worried about the "disproportionately small"-ness of zh.wikipedia. Given the small percentage of zh.wiki users that would actually gravitate to a new Wikipedia of this type, it would make almost no difference in the size of zh.wiki, and zh.wiki is already huge (it used to have a few hundred articles, then 10k would've been huge, but now it just has got to be bigger or it is way too small) and is growing at a good enough rate that such a minor draw away from it would be compensated for completely in less than two months.
With all due respect, this is selective spin.
19,000 articles is decent, but it's not "huge."
Most everyone in the ZH community knows the periodic inaccessibility in the PRC starting in June 2004 has hurt growth, so every dedicated member is important. If you look at the stats, only at the end of last year did ZH get "active wikipedians" back to the level of May 2004. There are only about 40 "very active" Wikipedians, and the number of "new Wikipedians" has not recovered, regressing back to February 2004 levels.
A wiki with one person can be a very lonely place. Seems a better use of resources to have the Suzhou, Hangzhou, Wu (linguistics) and related pages in better shape, than to start a new Wikipedia with one person.
http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%8B%8F%E5%B7%9E http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%9D%AD%E5%B7%9E http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%90%B4%E6%96%B9%E8%A8%80
-- Andrew Lih (User:Fuzheado)