[Wikimediaindia-l] Quality Issues with English Wikipedia

[Srikanth Ramakrishnan]

Ashwin,
This is a known fact for a while.
The number of active English editors working on English articles [India
ones], improving the articles, adding citations, fixing grammar has gone
down significantly in the last two years.
Besides this, there are a lot of so called Indian editors who claim to
improve articles but only push their content across the project.
I don't want to take names, so of you want, we can discuss this off list.
Regards,
Srikanth.

On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 9:26 AM, Ashwin Baindur <ashwin.baindur at gmail.com>wrote:

> This is a letter to all Indian editors of the English Wikipedia requesting
> discussion, cooperation and help.
>
> Recently I was asked to give a three to four minute presentation on the
> state of WikiProject India on English Wikipedia for the session on state of
> Indic Wikipedias at the recently concluded WikiConference in Mumbai. At
> first I thought nothing about the matter, but as I was compiling the
> report, I came across statistics which would horrify any of us.
>
> To begin with, as of time of writing this post, WikiProject India has a
> total of 90,021 articles. This is a very large number and second only to
> Hindi Wikipedia's 100,588 articles. Since all these English articles cover
> only India or some aspect of its geography, history, culture or its people,
> this set of 90,000+ articles is important to all Indians, representing the
> largest core of knowledge about India on any Wikipedia project.
>
> But all of this is not high quality stuff. User:Svick on English Wikipedia
> provides a useful service to WikProjects on English Wikipedia. He provides
> a WikiProject-wise listing of articles which have improvement tags such as
> {{unreferenced}}, {{cleanup}}, {{copyedit}} and so on. In his report for
> WikiProject India, at the following url:
>
>
> http://toolserver.org/~svick/CleanupListing/CleanupListingByCat.php?project=India
>
> you will find that of the 79435 articles in this project which were
> assessed by Svick, a total of 52077 articles or 65.6 % are marked for
> cleanup, with 86271 issues in total. These are tagged with 82 different
> types of tags, the most populous being :
>
> * Articles with unsourced statements (6815)
> * Articles lacking reliable references (1989)
> * Articles needing additional references (4840)
> * Articles lacking sources (8970)
> * BLP articles lacking sources (1297)
> * Articles needing cleanup (2751)
> * Articles containing potentially dated statements (9317)
> * All articles needing coordinates (14571)
> * Articles to be expanded (1020)
>
> Besides this, there are 40,338 articles unassessed for importance and
> 20,527 for quality, making a backlog of 60,865 assessments.
>
> In addition, of the 90,000+ articles, there are 43,843 stubs and 10,986
> start class articles. All these need to be developed in time also.
>
> Besides these are a very large number of cryptic articles, articles
> pertaining to India but not tagged on the talk page with the WikiProject
> banner. The articles themselves sometimes need more cleanup tags than are
> marked at present.
>
> You may have read Sven Manguard's special opinion editorial in the
> Signpost some time ago
>
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-10-31/Opinion_essay
>
> wherein he has drawn attention to the hundreds of thousands of articles
> needing cleanup and improvement on Wikipedia as a whole.  That is exactly
> the issue with WikiProject India, as of now.
>
> To me it appears that - Something needs to be done URGENTLY.
>
> My own suggestion is that this can easily be tackled if all of us do a
> little bit every day. Many hands make light work. There are about 450
> active editors listed on the WikiProject members page. If each of us
> decided to do just one cleanup task each day, then we can do away with
> 1,64,500 odd problems in a year. Over time, these issues will fall to
> negligible levels.
>
> Please reply to this thread with your views. Firstly, do you agree with
> me. Is there a problem or am I sensationalising the case? What exactly are
> the issues and how do we resolve them. Can we as Indians rise to the
> challenge and bring down these backlogs to manageable levels. Please  give
> us any ideas, inputs, insights or critiques that may occur to you.
>
> Warm regards,
>
> Ashwin Baindur
> ------------------------------------------------------
>
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-- 
Regards,
Srikanth Ramakrishnan.
Wikipedia Coimbatore Meetup on December 10th.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meetup/Coimbatore
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