[Wikimediaindia-l] Quantity Vs Quality: Hindi Wikipedia story

[Shiju Alex]

>
> *Jimmy Wales mentioned how stub articles on the populated places in United
> States drove the growth of English Wikipedia. **People hailing from these
> places would google their hometowns and arrive at Wikipedia.*
>
*
*This might be true for English or European language wikipedias. But a very
example to follow for Indian wiki communities.

*A typical scenario.*

A normal Indian user search for an article about his home town in internet (
*by typing in his mother language script*), find an article about it *in the
respective language wikipedia*, click the edit button, and then enhance it.

Highly improbable!!!   To reach that stage, normal Indian users need to
cross lot of hurdles (awareness, willingness, fonts, rendering issues,
typing tools, and so on) . Very rarely, experienced wikipedians in the
respective language wikipedia may enhance it. The chances of even that is
very less in Indian Wikipedias. Just check this list itself. How many hyper
active English language wikipedians (Indians) edited in their respective
mother language wikipedia? If this is the case with experienced editors we
do not to mention about non-wiki users. From last year's
statistics<http://shijualex.wordpress.com/2011/02/27/indian-language-wikipedias-2010-statistical-report/>we
know the community strength of different Indian language wikipedias.

I would like to see few *bot created stub article* in any Indian language
Wikipedia, later *enhanced by IPs or new users*.* Increasing the article
count without building the community will be very bad for any Indian
Wikipedia*. If we have a big community to work on the rest of the tasks
after the article creation, then there is no harm in creating stub articles
using bots in a systematic way. I think Tamil wikipedians had done this.

Utkarsh pointed to some others issues also in the blogpost.


Situation will change as more people become aware about the language
computing tools of the respective language. But at that time if  they get a
wiki with articles highly disorganized, it is not going to help anyone.


Shiju


**
On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 8:09 PM, mayur <mayurdce at gmail.com> wrote:

> I think that were stub articles, there is nothng wrong in creating stub
> articles by bot.As per Jimmy wales "*There’s nothing wrong with the idea
> of generating articles on populated places using bots. During one of his
> recent visits to India, Jimmy Wales mentioned how stub articles on the
> populated places in United States drove the growth of English Wikipedia.
> People hailing from these places would google their hometowns and arrive at
> Wikipedia. They would then start adding the missing details to these
> articles, becoming active contributors in the process."
>
> That why hindi wiki had such kind of stub articles, These article were
> generated just before utkarsh's analysis.Unfortunately they got some error
> due to some bot script error. We were already aware of that.Due to some
> factual errors these articles were deleted instantaneously. In last 4 month
> hindi wiki has deleted about 20,000 such kind of stub articles per our
> community discussion.We have also banned creation of very short article
> through a abuse filter which has not allowed about 2000 article creation for
> last 3 months.Giving a little information about any article is not bad as it
> contain information but as these recently  created **Village **article got
> some errors due to error in bot script and incorrect information that's why
> we deleted such type of articles immediately.Such kind of articles are
> present in many big wikis.I am happy after deleting 20,000 such kind of
> article hindi wiki still have 80,000 articles.We want our wiki growth in all
> dimensions not only in no of articles.
>
> Thank you and Regards
> Mayur
> Hindi Wikipedian
> *
> On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 7:29 PM, Ravishankar <ravidreams at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> http://ut7.in/2011/03/quantity-over-quality-the-sad-story-of-hindi-wikipedia/
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