[Foundation-l] 10 thoughts on how to improve the quality of Swedish Wikipedia‏

[Ziko van Dijk]

Therefore I thought I'd share the essay with you. Hopefully some of you will
> see it fit to publish somewhere on your Wikipedia. For maximum effect, cut



A very good idea, because many Wikipedians only know 1 or 2 Wikipedias quite
well, but don't know anything about other Wikipedias.
Listening to Hannes Wader's interpretation of Carl Michael Bellman, I note
some thoughts raised in me reading your's.


Right now we have [roughly 276 000] articles on Swedish Wikipedia.


This means that there are many more articles compared to de.WP, based on the
numbers of native speakers.:-) In general, we Wikipedians should not be too
disappointed, if our high expectations don't come out in the following some
years.

In the statistics, it is striking for me that some rates are very low in
sv.WP. Only 52% of the sv.WP articles have more than 0,5 KB (compare: 79% in
en.WP, 88% in de.WP). A more restrict policy about stubs could be very
useful, indeed. Having many stubs is like having a large to-do-list, giving
a bad impression and wasting time we can use for more useful work.


It take up a lot of energy, the conflicts,  the arbitrations, and the
> bothersome users that push their agenda and spend most of their time on
> svwp


I could imagine that the smaller the community, the more unlikely it is that
members of that community are excluded. But the troublemakers cost us a high
fee - they are mobbing away other, more productive members.


Hence, I'd like to add one thing: a meter that shows the quality of the
> encyclopedia, already at the Main page. This is an example, that has been


Yes, the number of articles is simply not a good tool to measure. But the
number of featured articles - it depends on the criteria for a featured
article.


> Teachers need lesson plans for how to view material on the internet. There
> many of us Wikipedians can teach a lot - about Wikipedia's quality
> programs



In my experience, we Wikipedians tend to underestimate how difficult it is
to many people contributing to the Wikipedia. Take a senior citizen, maybe a
former school teacher, highly educated and motivated. His first problem
might be how to use the Browser. They need much more coaching than the
Wikipedia site itself can provide. This means, that Wikimedia must take over
such a task. Young people who grew up with computers tend to believe that
nowadays everything can be done simple via internet and that you don't need
traditional clubs and associations any more. Partly, such misbelieves come
from a certain "wiki mentality". The wiki way works for many things, but not
for everything.

Quality: As a coincidence, yesterday I compared the reference culture in
some Wikipedias, also the Swedish (I had half a year of Swedish at Bochum
university :-) ).
Compare the referencing of
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesischer_Unabh%C3%A4ngigkeitskrieg(Indonesian
war of independece
de.WP)
and
http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politionele_acties (the same in nl.WP)

The Dutch article has only a list of literature (split in two, for any
reason) called "*Bronnen, noten en/of referenties" (sources, notes and/or
references; three words, because* the Dutch wikipedians could not agree on
one). In my view as a historian, this is no "reference" at all, because a
critical reader has no realistic chance to check where the knowledge comes
from.
A well written styleguide would educate an editor how to work more
precisely, at least, if he wants to see his article a featured one. Maybe
there should be a commission to make a total revision of styleguides and
other guides...

Ziko




-- 
Ziko van Dijk
Roomberg 30
NL-7064 BN Silvolde