Hi Lars,
It should also be noted that in addition to lacking the types of important articles you mention, we have some fairly fluffy articles not usually found in encyclopedias.
Most of our "list" pages, of which there must be some thousands on en:, are not to be found in an encyclopedia and can be somehow merged with a relevant page.
Having articles for each separate Pokemon, or each separate character on every popular situational comedy, or separate articles for "Demography of Sweden" (as opposed to the sub-articles where they really should be) but with all the information there just ripped directly from the CIA factbook and relatively uninformative (a link to the CIA factbook would probably be better), are what inflates our article count to such an incredible number when we still lack important articles on important historical, literary, cultural, and scientific topics.
Why is it that we have [[Blastoise]] but not [[Abdominal muscles]]?
Mark
On Sat, 5 Feb 2005 21:28:11 +0100 (CET), Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
Stirling Newberry wrote:
Sanger's points do have merit, however, before taking measures of the kind he proposes, we should continue to place faith in the mechanism of participatory dialectic that has produced more than most people would have thought possible in a very short time.
Suppose Wikipedia were to introduce some restrictions, for example that you would have to register a name before you could edit, or that you would have to have your uploaded images "approved" by an administrator before they can be displayed in articles. How could we measure (in numbers) the effects of such a policy change? How much is creativity reduced and how much is vandalism reduced by the restriction? Can we measure this? If we can, wouldn't it be interesting to try such a restriction for a limited time (say, a week), while doing the measurement? Do we have any numbers of the amount of vandalism or quality of contributions today?
Two and a half years ago, I introduced the "Biggest Wiki" page on Meatball and pushed the "comma count" (number of articles) as the ultimate ranking of wikis, but I guess we are past that stage now, at least for the Wikipedias with more than 100,000 articles. In July 2002, the English Wikipedia had 35,324 articles. Today it has 467,237 articles, more than any printed encyclopedia, and still none of them gives a decent overview of "Czech literature" from Jan Hus to Karel Capek, Vaclav Havel and today. Instead of wish-listing for individual articles, how can we measure the overall article quality? Just looking for stubs is not good enough, since [[Czech literature]] is more than a stub, but less than expected from an encyclopedia.
In 1919, this Swedish encyclopedia used two and a half pages of fine print to cover Czech literature, http://runeberg.org/nfci/0108.html The supplement in 1926 adds half a page that mentions Karel Capek, http://runeberg.org/nfcr/0476.html -- for a total of 3,000 words. But Vaclav Havel has of course been added after that. The Swedish encyclopedia's division of Czech literature history into three coarse periods 900-1400, 1400-1770 and 1770-1919 is probably obsolete. The Czech Wikipedia's article on Czech literature has a more modern chronological division into sections and separate articles.
-- Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l