[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia, a world without borders with borders?

[Eugene van der Pijll]

b m schreef:
> As for the low quality content on NL, i agree that EN was conceived a couple
> of years earlier, but the Dutch wiki has over 300k articles, that's a number
> that suggests a large userbase, and high quality. But as i demonstrated, an
> article about the most famous scientist of the last 100 years cites 0
> sources. I believe that is wrong. On the Dutch wiki the image use policy is
> enforced with vigor, but the "citing references" issue is hardly addressed.

AFAIK, "Citing references" is not a fundamental WP policy. WP:OR is, and
"Citing references" is how the English wikipedia implements that.

> I agree that Jimbo can't interfere with every wiki in every language, -but-
> the Dutch wiki is in the top 10 of wikis in size. And i believe that on
> other large wikis the same issue applies. The German wiki is second in size,
> and has only 3 references in the article about Einstein.

On the Dutch wikipedia, the German wiki is often viewed as the most
reliable one, more so than the English one. Reliability is often
uncorrelated to the number of references in the article. The only
correlation comes from the fact that an article with more references
likely has had more attention from more editors.

> As for NPOV, I have seen more examples of the sort on various articles, even
> about animals. Some articles echo a sort of "Greenpeace" sound, whether it
> be deliberate or not. The Dutch wiki also has no template for "this article
> is written like an advertisement". Not because they had no time to make one,
> but because for some reason, they have no desire for it.

Thank god. Well, no I take that back; the English wikipedia doesn't look
that bad after I've made all boxes invisible in my monobook.css.

When an article reads like an advertisement, I'll recognize that by
reading the article and thinking "this looks like an advertisement". I
do not need a colourful box to tell me that. Apparently, in the English
wp, I'm in the minority, but it's a valid point of view.

> My question, can, and is it desirable, that Jimbo or some other official
> intervenes?

Because you want those awful colourful boxes on every wikipedia?

> Do we want other language wikis to be inferior because they
> are not under strict regulations?

That is something that the other language wikipedias will have to decide
for themselves. The strict regulations for the English wikipedia were
decided upon by the en.wp community; it is not our job to do it for the
other wikipedias. And it wouldn't be appreciated by them.

You should probably make your suggestions on the Dutch wikipedia's
Village Pump.

Eugene