[Foundation-l] Tragical dynamics: that run for the number of articles

[Tomasz Ganicz]

2008/6/27 Ziko van Dijk <zvandijk at googlemail.com>:
> Maybe this is not the most popular item, but I do like to comment on
> the news about Japanese and Polish Wikipedias and their 500,000
> articles each. In fact, jp.WP actually has 500,000, but pl.WP does
> not.
> In an attempt to compare Wikipedia language editions I have clicked
> the button "random articles" and with a sample of 50 clicks each I
> have calculated how many articles a language edition really has, minus
> all those pseudo articles.
>
> A pseudo article is e.g.
> http://pdc.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikini
> http://co.wikipedia.org/wiki/191
> http://ksh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varsseveld
> http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandil
> http://vo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poplar_Bluff
>
> Many Wikipedias loose, in my calculation, quite a huge percentage of
> their articles. There is one honourable exception: Japanese Wikipedia,
> which in 50 clicks showed absolutely no pseudo article. If Japanese
> Wikipedia would have such a floppy policy about new articles as many
> others have, jp.WP were already close to one million "articles". Pl.WP
> has for about 300,000 real articles, very respectable, but not what it
> seems to be.
>
> Since the beginnings, Wikipedians report about the number of articles,
> having to tell something about to the media and to be proud about
> their achievements. They rank Wikipedia language editions by the
> number of articles. This has caused tragical dynamics: many
> Wikipedians and Wikipedias are so obsessed with this number that they
> produce rubbish articles to show off. Volapük Wikipedia with more than
> 100,000 pseudo articles created by a single bot using user is only the
> top of the iceberg, and when someone called to close vo.WP, vo.WP was
> supported by a amazing number of users from many language editions:
> cosi fan tutte. Wikipedians could and should use their time for more
> useful article work.
>

Well... Bear in mind that English Wikipedia also contains quite a lot
of bot-created articles and in fact English Wikipedia was the first
one to produce it. The others just followed the idea and started to do
it in order to artifically increase the number of articles. Polish
started to do it, when our rank went down due to mass production of
bot-created articles in Swedish, Italian, French and other Wikipedias.

Comapare:

http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aignerville

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aignerville

or

http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%C3%B2vol

and

http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%C3%B2vol

http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eksj%C3%B6_(stad)

and

http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eksj%C3%B6

http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dystrykt_Set%C3%BAbal

and

http://nn.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set%C3%BAbal

etc...

Nothing really special with Polish Wikipedia - many others do exactly
the same including English. We had simply more active coders who knew
how to feed bots. But - as you can compare with other Wikipedias they
did sometimes really good job - in a sense that many bot created stubs
in Polish Wikipedia contains more data than their equivalents in for
example Swedish or French Wikipedia.

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gr%C3%B3dek

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drzewica

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pszczyna

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jas%C5%82o

etc...


-- 
Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz
http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek
http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/
http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html