[Foundation-l] Lack of research on Wikipedia

[Erik Zachte]

Lars Aronsson wrote:

> Day 1: Create article "Apple is a fruit".
> Day 2: Create article "Pear is a fruit".
> Day 3: Extend article about apples. Add photos. Cite sources.
> Day 3: Zero growth in the number of articles. Panic!!!

I concur wholeheartedly. Focusing on rising article counts gave us a thrill
for many years, and now it is difficult to kick the bad habit.
The number became less and less meaningful with introduction of bots. It
also skews the comparison between large and small wikipedias. 
There is more bot activity on small wikipedias, relatively speaking, but my
guess is most of that activity on small wikipedias is on housekeeping tasks
(e.g. interwiki links).
On a small wikipedia (at least most of them) there is simply not enough of a
community to drive this semi automated article creation process.

Also a say 30% share of bot edits on some Wikipedia does not mean 30% of
articles have been created by bots. My guess is that share is higher. 

Too often I see people bragging how they managed to 'one up' another
Wikipedia in the rankings.
I think it would help if we discouraged any bragging on the 4th millionth
article in the English Wikipedia at all and downplayed any inquiries from
the media.

Here is nice trivia which is somewhat relevant:
Volapük has 118,788 articles (July 2009). Out of these 54 were added in the
last 12 months. This is because of retirement of an article creation bot.
There were 224.481 edits on Volapük (96% by bots) in the last year.
Ah I just learned I have a welcome message on my user page on the Volapük
Wikipedia :-)

Erik Zachte

http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/BotActivityMatrix.htm
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesCurrentStatusVerbose.htm