[Foundation-l] How to improve quality of Wikipedia?

[Michael Peel]

Czesc all,

On 10 Oct 2010, at 06:54, Przykuta wrote:

> Hi
> 
> In pl wiki "depth" is very weak. We have many edits, like other bigger Wikipedias, but Ratio is problematical (Non-Articles/Articles). We have not a lot of non-article pages. Could you help us? Any ideas?
> 
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Non-Articles/Articles
> 
> http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesArticlesEditsPerArticle.htm
> 
> http://s23.org/wikistats/wikipedias_html.php?sort=good_desc
> 
> http://pl.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Specjalna%3ANowe_strony&namespace=4&tagfilter=&username=
> 
> Przykuta

It's a bit ambiguous as to whether this is <number of non-article edits/non-articles> over <article edits/non-article edits> (or even the number of articles vs. number of non-articles), but I'll assume the first one of these.

Is this actually a symptom of a problem? It could even be viewed as the absence of a problem. One of en.wp's problems can be over-discussing something before it is carried out in article space, which can be seen by the extremely high number of edits to the talk pages compared to the content pages. Having a minimal amount of discussion per article can be seen as an efficient way of creating articles. However, it could also be seen as people not wanting to challenge the content of an article in a critical way, which might be more of a downside - a reasonable level of debate/controversy about articles tends to be productive in producing a balanced article on the subject

I think image discussion is somewhat of a red herring/off topic discussion, as I'm not sure that there is much discussion that actually happens around individual images. The same applies to bot article edits, if these only make small numbers of edits.

Does pl.wp have WikiProjects? If not, then perhaps this could explain the reduced number of non-article edits, given how many pages on en.wp only have wikiproject templates on their talk pages (or cases where having a non-redlink has promoted discussions).

Thanks,
Mike Peel

P.S. I wish that en.wp sent all images to Commons - it would ease a lot of issues. ;-)