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

[BalaSundaraRaman]

Praveen,

You've shown how much insight we can glean by provoking Malayalam Wiki friends. 
;)
We all got a great inside view of the different aspects of participation in one 
of the finest Indian wikis.

> 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. :)

I don't think anyone doubted that.

- 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: praveenp <me.praveen at gmail.com>
>To: Discussion list on Indian language projects of Wikimedia. 
><wikimediaindia-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
>Sent: Thu, January 27, 2011 5:58:25 PM
>Subject: Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Malayalam wikipedia crossed the 10 Lakh/1 
>million edits milestone
>
> 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 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 വർഗ്ഗം:ഫലകങ്ങൾ). 


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 (കവാടം) 
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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