[Wikimedia-l] Apparently, Wikipedia is ugly
Yaroslav M. Blanter
putevod at mccme.ru
Sat Jul 14 18:01:43 UTC 2012
On Sat, 14 Jul 2012 13:37:57 -0400, Kirill Lokshin wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 14, 2012 at 1:13 PM, Svip <svippy at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Consider, for example, article number 4 million:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Izbat_Al_Burj. It's a city of some
> 70,000
> people -- is anyone really going to claim that this is a
> "specialized"
> topic?
>
> Kirill
This is actually a very good example. The article was started by Dr.
Blofield who is widely known as geostub creator. I am not going to
discuss now whether mass creation of geostubs is good or not (this is a
separate issue where people sometimes express strong opinions), but the
fact is that most of his articles remain two-line stubs for years unil
(if ever) they attract somebody's attention. Most of my own activity on
English Wikipedia is about writing and expanding geoarticles related to
Russia. In particular, in 2010 Dr. Blofield created one-line stubs of
all districts of Russia (over a thousand). Those which Ezhiki and me
worked on are in a relatively good shape, others are just waiting for us
- it can easily take a decade until this work has been completed. But
both Ezhiki and I are native Russian speakers and have interest in the
subject - and in a sense this is a special skill. There is much more
things to do in English Wikipedia for me, a Russin native speaker, a
speaker of several other languages, an academic, somebody with a broad
range of interests - than for a teenager who does not have any special
skills but feels underappreciated and needs attention. And there are
many more underappreciated teenagers around than people with my profile.
Returning to Izbat_Al_Burj article - usually a 4Mth article would get
an enormous attention and a huge number of hits. The fact that it is
only three paragraphs long at the time I am writing this means - I guess
- that all information easily available in English is scarce and is
still there. We are waiting either for a native Arabic speaker with
access to Arabic literature, or someone who by chance has skiils in
history, in climatology, in human geography of Egypt - in case there is
smth special about this city which is not yet in the article. And all
this, including knowledge of Arabic, I would call special skills.
Cheers
Yaroslav
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