[Wikimediaindia-l] Wikimediaindia-l Digest, Vol 31, Issue 54

[Achal Prabhala]

Stepping in here without knowing all there is to about this, so excuse 
me if there are gaps.

It seems to me as if no one metric in any way outdoes others; i.e. one 
high metric is just that, and can be well celebrated on it's own without 
imputing (or relating to) 'overall' strength/ success based on multiple 
metrics.

Might it make sense to think of it this way? That is to say, the overall 
strength of a language Wikipedia is something like the overall strength 
of an average Wikipedian; a good score on a commonly acceptable metric 
is a wonderful thing but by no means is *the* thing. In the discussion 
so far, it doesn't seem to as if you can substitute depth with any other 
metric (even a more commonly acceptable one like article count) and say 
that a particular language Wikipedia - as a whole - is better on that 
basis. Simultaneously, it doesn't mean that an achievement in depth is 
anything to scoff at either..

It seems as if there are a whole host of tangible and intangible factors 
that make up the success of a Wikimedia project; some are measurable, 
others definitely not.


On Thursday 27 January 2011 05:58 PM, 
wikimediaindia-l-request at lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
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> Today's Topics:
>
>     1. The Hindu : "One among the clan of Wikipedians"
>        (CherianTinu Abraham)
>     2. Re: Malayalam wikipedia crossed the 10 Lakh/1	million edits
>        milestone (BalaSundaraRaman)
>     3. Re: Malayalam wikipedia crossed the 10 Lakh/1 million edits
>        milestone (Ravishankar)
>     4. Why do new users create accounts on Wikipedia? (BalaSundaraRaman)
>     5. Re: Malayalam wikipedia crossed the 10 Lakh/1 million edits
>        milestone (praveenp)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2011 12:46:52 +0530
> From: CherianTinu Abraham<tinucherian at gmail.com>
> Subject: [Wikimediaindia-l] The Hindu : "One among the clan of
> 	Wikipedians"
> To: "Discussion list on Indian language projects of Wikimedia."
> 	<wikimediaindia-l at lists.wikimedia.org>, 	Bangalore Wikimedia list
> 	<Wikimedia-IN-BLR at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Cc: "Achal Prabhala \(Wikimedia Foundation\)"<aprabhala at gmail.com>
> Message-ID:
> 	<AANLkTikoP7AwwFG_QkKOSx-XusAA0N-xHbJhO01ZD-GQ at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> The Hindu : "One among the clan of Wikipedians",
> featuring Achal Prabhala
> http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-neighbourhood/article1128553.ece
>
>
> Regards
> Tinu Cherian
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> ------------------------------
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> Message: 2
> Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2011 23:29:47 -0800 (PST)
> From: BalaSundaraRaman<sundarbecse at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Malayalam wikipedia crossed the 10
> 	Lakh/1	million edits milestone
> To: "Discussion list on Indian language projects of Wikimedia."
> 	<wikimediaindia-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:<770912.87393.qm at web59916.mail.ac4.yahoo.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> +1. Yes, milestones are nice things to celebrate, but not something to start
> regarding as a metric.
>
> - Sundar
>
>   "That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for
> the expression of thought, is a truth generally admitted."
> - George Boole, quoted in Iverson's Turing Award Lecture
>
>
>> From: CherianTinu Abraham<tinucherian at gmail.com>
>> To: Discussion list on Indian language projects of Wikimedia.
>> <wikimediaindia-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
>> Sent: Thu, January 27, 2011 11:45:17 AM
>> Subject: Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Malayalam wikipedia crossed the 10 Lakh/1
>> million edits milestone
>>
>> Although page depth was not really connected with the current
>> trend,  Personally, I think page depth is no longer a reliable metric for
>> comparison, here is why I think so.
>>
>>
>> Assamese Wikipedia ( 312 articles) : page depth is 339 .
>> Sindi ( 355 articles): 381
>>
>>
>> Compare this with
>> Bengali ( 22,062 articles) : 374
>> Malayalam ( 16,414 articles) : 320
>>
>>
>> It is self-explanatory...
>>
>>
>> Technically 1 million edits is a cute milestone ( congrats to ml wiki) to take
>> notice, but we cannot consider it as real metric for comparison among
>> Wikipedias. There are language Wikipedias where Google translation/Machine
>> translations or bot created articles are banned or controlled tightly. There
>> are Wikipedias, where they have a free run. Please note that I am not saying
>> taht they are either good or bad. There are Wikipedias where constant updation
>> of articles happening, due a vibrant Wikicommunity. There are Wikipedians who
>> like to work on the articles offline and then bring it live with a single edit.
>>
>>
>> Having said that, it is advisable to do what each community feels best for their
>> language Wikipedia. Of course, it is good to have an healthy competition :)
>>
>>
>> But everybody, please do continue to report such interesting milestones and
>> statistics. We all love that...
>>
>>
>> -Tinu Cherian
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 10:45 AM, Shiju Alex<shijualexonline at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>
>> We have users in Tamil Wikipedia who bulk upload 100s of complete articles they
>> wrote offline with just one edit per article.
>>
>> That happens in all the wikipedias which has an active community. That might
>> also be possible with the the Google translation project.
>>
>>> In general, quality of a wiki article improves as more people work on it. More
>>> edits from more number of users means more quality on the wiki article.
>>> Otherwise there is no difference between a knol/blogpost and a wiki article. :)
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> "Depths above 300 for Wikipedias below 100 000 articles have been automatically
>>> dismissed as irrelevant."
>> Who has mentioned about the depth in the below mail?
>>>
>>>
>>> When we focus on number of articles, some end up creating useless stubs.  The
>>> same should not happen when we focus on edit counts.
>>>
>> Yes. All wikis has stubs and almost of the articles are created as stub
>> articles.
>>
>>> Shiju
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 10:31 AM, Ravishankar<ravidreams at gmail.com>  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 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
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 10:18 AM, CherianTinu Abraham<tinucherian at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>> What probably Arjuna meant was that, some of Wikipedias are more welcoming to
>>> the creation of stub articles. I am not saying that Malayalam
>>> Wikipedia doesn't though...
>>>>
>>>> -Tinu Cherian
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Wikimediaindia-l mailing list
>>> Wikimediaindia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
>>>
>>>
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> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2011 14:09:14 +0530
> From: Ravishankar<ravidreams at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Malayalam wikipedia crossed the 10
> 	Lakh/1 million edits milestone
> To: "Discussion list on Indian language projects of Wikimedia."
> 	<wikimediaindia-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> 	<AANLkTikrwDdK5teriX-1BQmngD9d+trhX_OR7Z77jpk3 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 12:59 PM, BalaSundaraRaman<sundarbecse at yahoo.com>wrote:
>
>> +1. Yes, milestones are nice things to celebrate, but not something to
>> start regarding as a metric.
>>
> +1 :)
>
> When you start comparing with other wikis then it becomes a metric. And
> depth is the only metric related with total number of edits :)
>
> Ravu
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> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 4
> Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2011 01:56:07 -0800 (PST)
> From: BalaSundaraRaman<sundarbecse at yahoo.com>
> Subject: [Wikimediaindia-l] Why do new users create accounts on
> 	Wikipedia?
> To: "Discussion list on Indian language projects of Wikimedia."
> 	<wikimediaindia-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Cc: Lennart Guldbrandsson<l_guldbrandsson at hotmail.com>
> Message-ID:<125968.43541.qm at web59906.mail.ac4.yahoo.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
> Lennart is organising a survey to understand why users register in Wikipedia at
> all.
> During the first phase, English, German, French, Spanish, Swedish, Bengali and
> Bahasa Melayu are targetted.
> Some preliminary results are given at:
> http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Account_Creation_Improvement_Project#First_results_from_the_Account_creation_survey
>
>
> It would be nice if we can localise the survey and run it in most of our
> wikipedias. If anybody wants to volunteer to localise the survey, please get in
> touch with Lennart (copied) or drop a message in the talk page above.
>
> - Sundar
>
>
>   "That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for
> the expression of thought, is a truth generally admitted."
> - George Boole, quoted in Iverson's Turing Award Lecture
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 5
> Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2011 17:58:25 +0530
> From: praveenp<me.praveen at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Malayalam wikipedia crossed the 10
> 	Lakh/1 million edits milestone
> To: "Discussion list on Indian language projects of Wikimedia."
> 	<wikimediaindia-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:<4D4164E9.4000109 at gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> 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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> End of Wikimediaindia-l Digest, Vol 31, Issue 54
> ************************************************
>