[Wikimediaindia-l] Malayalam wikipedia crossed the 10 Lakh/1 million edits milestone

[praveenp]

On Thursday 27 January 2011 10:31 AM, Ravishankar wrote:
> Its not just about stubs.
>
> We have users in Tamil Wikipedia who bulk upload 100s of complete 
> articles they wrote offline with just one edit per article. One great 
> article can be uploaded in one click and one mediocre article can have 
> 100s of edits.
>
> According to
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias
>
> *"Depths above 300 for Wikipedias 
> <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias#Notes> below 
> 100 000 articles have been automatically dismissed as irrelevant."
> *
> When we focus on number of articles, some end up creating useless 
> stubs. The same should not happen when we focus on edit counts.
>
> Ravi
This may be nothing related to original thread. Sorry. Malayalam 
wikipedia has its strength and its weakness.

Depth is just an indicator of collaborative character of editors. For a 
massive multiauthor collaboration site, some measurement mechanism is 
better than none. But I don't think large number of edits are bad. If 
anyone thinks that articel by single edit is better than multi edited 
article, I must say thats not wiki style :( .

But there is an another issue, number of bot edits. Many ml users, 
mainly students, like to play with bots. Malayalam Wikipedia has never 
discouraged anyone for testing their bots (if their edits are okay), 
because user satisfaction is also a Wikipedia goal. We know that 
eventually they will create a great bot :).  Sometimes running a bot is 
not very simple. I had a spell checker bot and I had to overview all of 
its edits, because of Malayalam's ligatures and grammatical rules [or 
may be because bad logic ;-)]. Even after running couple of months, it 
threw exceptions. So I'll say bot edits also are a kind of manual 
inputs. Now there are many global bots, most of them contributing 
interwiki. Bot conflict and bot-edit-war occurs occasionally which we 
usually avoided by protecting the page or by noticing the owner (Recent 
eg: See history of ??????:??????? 
<http://ml.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%E0%B4%B5%E0%B5%BC%E0%B4%97%E0%B5%8D%E0%B4%97%E0%B4%82:%E0%B4%AB%E0%B4%B2%E0%B4%95%E0%B4%99%E0%B5%8D%E0%B4%99%E0%B5%BE&action=history>). 


Malayalam Wikipedia is a small wiki, just over 16000 pages on main 
namespace, so it is easy to exaggerate bot contribution. But actually it 
is not, whenever a bot identified as doing  unwanted edit it gets blocked.

There are many wiki-projects which always engage users to do something 
on wiki. So whenever a user find an error, even it is the minute one, 
he/she corrects it. Nobody waits for large content to edit. Many portal 
(?????) pages are there, which helps users to find their favourite topic.

In ml.wp - many pages in category namespace (there is an active 
categorization wiki-project, which keeps articles finely categorized), 
large number of templates and many help pages and project pages with 
good content (I'm sure that many of these help pages and project pages 
are really useful to new users to jump start wikipedia) are available. I 
think we are using talk pages aslo very well.

It is clear from depth formula, that all these factors can be 
incremental to "depth". So if anybody believes that Malayalam Wikipedia 
is irrelevant, I welcome them to there to check its irrelevancy and 
contribute their home wikii until it become irrelevant like Malayalam 
Wikipedia. :)

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