On Thu, Sep 11, 2008 at 4:04 AM, Syagrius <syagrius(a)caramail.com> wrote:
Hello,
As Wikipedia decided to change its main page presentation, I think that
Wikisource maybe should do the same. The "War" between the spanish and the
chinese wikisources demonstrates that the article count does not reflect the
true depht of a Wikisource, as someone can create thousands of very small
articles. What should the main page present ? I don't think that, as
Wikipedia did, chosing the number of visitors would be a good idea, since
Wikisource is very less known than Wikipedia, and the figures may be not
reliable. If these stats from Erik Zachte can be trusted (and renewed), I
would suggest that the number of words
http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikisource/EN/TablesDatabaseWords.htm may be the
fairest figure to present. The only problem would be : is the number of
words given for the Chinese (and Japanese, also) wikisource correct ?
It is an interesting statistic, and I havent investigated the
algorithm being used. Is there a mathematical description of the
algorithm used?
My first guess is that we would need to weight it according to the
entropy of each language. For example, Chinese and Japanese have a
much higher entropy, so they need to be weighted higher.
What do you think of this proposition ?
If we are going to change the front page of the portal, it is these
stats that I would like to see used and improved:
http://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:ProofreadPage_Statistics
We need to present ourselves as a _serious_ project, doing top quality work.
I suggest that we also feature two texts on the main portal each month:
- one work that is hosted on
wikisource.org - i.e. from a language
which is _not_ on a subdomain
- one work from a subdomain, from a different sub-domain each month,
_after_ it has been selected as a featured text on the subdomain.
--
John Vandenberg