[Foundation-l] About the low-hanging fruit

[Yaroslav M. Blanter]

This is an essay. May be someone can find it useful.

For a number of reasons which are not appropriate to address here, three
weeks ago I voluntarily left Russian Wikipedia, which used to be my home
wiki for four years, and decided to turn to low-key activity in the
articles in English Wikipedia. I was of course participating in all these
strategy discussions, have seen the user statistics, have heard the
reasoning about the "low hanging fruit", and was under impression that
there is not so much work to do on en.wp, and that I would have
difficulties finding topics where I can easily contribute. I had very
little previous experience with en.wp, mainly inserting interwiki links,
images, and correcting typos and factual mistakes.

Well, for the first article I just happened to notice an important topic
where there was no English articles. I created an article on the famous
Russian architect Yakov Bukhvostov. That took me several days, and I
collected some material which could be interesting for the usability team
(what difficulties a novice, even with extended experience of editing a
Wikimedia project, can face), but this is not my point. In the meanwhile I
got a welcome notice on my talk page which, in particular, contained a link
to Wikiproject Russia. I was not going to participate in the project, but
followed the link out of curiosity, thinking that the project may have a
list of important missing articles, or important articles for improvement,
or smth like that. Indeed, it had a number of lists, and, looking through
them, I noticed an article on Solvychegodsk listed. Solvychegodsk is a
historical town remotely located in the North of Russia, which I happened
to visit in 2005, and which I still know pretty well. I followed the link
and found an article which was pretty much reasonably, by no means a stub,
but where I immediately could see what information I could add. Well, I
added the information, extending the article a bit, then followed the link
to the Kotlassky District - the second-order administrative unit, similar
to a county in the US, where Solvychegodsk was located. The article was
shorter than my sentence above describing the district, and had three
templates: one saying it is a stub, another one that it is too short, and
the third one that it lacks the geographic coordinates. In two or three
days, I extended it from 850 bytes to 10kbytes, using Russian sources found
in the internet (I also have some books at home, but I did not use them for
this particular article) and cleaning up some Commons categories. Then I
noticed that out of 20 districts of Arkhangelsk Oblast (to which
Solvychegodsk belongs) 10 do not have articles, 9 are in a pitiful state,
and 1 I have just extended. I started working on them, and then noticed
that some important related articles are missing as well - for instance, I
created two articles on district centers, two on (big) rivers located in
these districts, and even one on an artist who had an estate in one of the
districts. In two weeks I created or considerably improved about 15
articles. First I tried to translate parts of the articles from Russia
Wikipedia, but quickly discovered that they contain some factual errors and
in most cases also not very extended, so that the articles I created are in
most cases better that the articles in ru.wp. I have written all of the
articles myself, and used exclusively Russian sources (for most if not all
of the subjects, English sources do not exist). 

>From what I can see, nobody else is working on this class of articles. I
had some help from user Ezhiki in the beginning, and the help was very much
appreciated: instead of going to my talk page and trying to explain me
smth, he just edited a couple of the pages I was working on, correcting
some typical mistakes (templates, some standart names, spelling of Russian
names etc which are by no means a common knowledge) and referring to
relevant policies. On one occasion, I also asked the wikiproject about a
usage of a certain template. All in all, I had not more than 10 edits of
other users in "my" articles. Walking to the office today, I tried to
calculate how many articles are waiting for my attention. Well, Russia has
about 80 republics and oblasts, which amounts to say 2000 districts. Most
of them are stubs or non-existent. Including district centers, rivers,
mountains, stubs on the towns, some notable persons I would have interest
to write an article on, this must be not less than 3000 articles. With my
speed of 1 article per day (which presently I am not planning to increase)
this would be 10 years of my work. Note that this is just a narrow topic
which does not overlap with my professional interest (I am a theoretical
physicist specializing in nanoscience). In this field, I am just an amateur
(may be slightly above the average level). 

My conclusions from the two-weeks experience:

1. May be the really low hanging fruit, almost on the ground level, has
been picked up, but in the vast majority of articles there is much room for
improvement. Note that I did not add any special things - only the basic
info which you expect to find in the encyclopaedia. I did not aim at GA or
FA. I used may be 10% of the information I had, and what I had I found in
the internet.

2. I seem to be perfectly suited for these articles - I have a general
interest in the topic, and also I know Russian and can work with Russian
sources. On the other hand, I an not a native speaker, and I can leave some
slight spelling errors / incorrect wording etc. This may be a problem, and
generally I am not sure how this problem can be solved. However, if I
estimate the balance, probably I created more of a useful product than I
created troubles.

3. Even for an technically experienced user as myself it is difficult to
start contributing to the project. I was able to clear the barrier, but I
am afraid many of the regular users would leave, not being able to
understand the usage of templates and similar things. On there other side,
I got some necessary help, and I know where to ask if I need more.

4. Comparing the quality of this particular class of articles to Russian
Wikipedia, I see both advantages and disadvantages. Obviously, there is a
high chance that someone just living in the district will add some info in
the article in Russian Wikipedia. On the other hand, there are two major
problems with these articles in Russian Wikipedia - copyright violation
(big pieces are added to articles and stay there for years - things became
considerably better with the implementation of flagged revisions, but still
persist), and adding a big number of insignificant and often unsourced
details, including spamming of local interest websites. The English
articles are completely free of these problems. I realize though that this
line of reasoning can not be generalized to all articles, since the
articles on other topics may have very different issues. 

Summing up, there is plenty of room on the bottom (c) Richard Feynman.

Cheers
Yaroslav