[Foundation-l] About the low-hanging fruit

Yaroslav M. Blanter putevod at mccme.ru
Fri Jun 10 12:29:26 UTC 2011


>> You have an expert knowledge in this topic, namely the knowledge of
>> Russian language. Most of English Wikipedia editors don't.
>>
<...>
> 
> Most unilingual English editors are surprised by the vast quantity of 
> low hanging fruit. Out of curiosity at one time I looked up the fairly 
> common Spanish name "Reyes" in the original 70 volume "Enciclopedia 
> universal ilustrada". I found 30 individuals there with that simple 
> uncompounded surname. Only two of these appeared in the English 
> Wikipedia, and only one of the two in the Spanish Wikipedia. Could 
> something similar be said of the great Soviet Encyclopedia? I have 
> before looked at a couple short encyclopedic works in Russian, one 
> relating to hockey and one to movies. Both did address their subject as 
> it related to the United States as well as their own country. Comparably

> sized American publications would leave the reader wondering if there 
> even was such a thing as a Russian film industry.  The dismissive 
> attitude that Russian works were written by Communists becomes quite 
> thin in subjects that are inherently apolitical.
> 

Indeed, 7 out of 19 articles I created over three weeks are in Great
Soviet Encyclopaedia (and about a dozen of more among those I expanded as
well). One of these (on a folklorist Anna Astakhova, which I started today)
does not exist in Russian Wikipedia. Admittedly all of them (in GSE, not
those I created) are very short and hardly useful for creation a Wikipedia
article - although GSE gives a clear proof of notability, just in case.

Cheers
Yaroslav




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