[Wikipedia-l] Individual Wikipedias for different Sinitic vernaculars (Cantonese debate) - update

[Mark Williamson]

19k articles is huge. It is more than decent. It makes zh a usable
encyclopedic resource with only a few omissions in normal browsing.

With all due respect, 19k is huge because Wikipedias which actually
celebrate breaking 300 or 500 are so much smaller, even Wikipedias
which celebrate breaking 1k or 5k or even 10k are a great deal smaller
and yet can sometimes be useful.

Your only giving actual figures for "very active" Wikipedians is also
selective spin. "Active" Wikipedians are obviously much higher in
number and are what makes zh.wikipedia a community rather than a
closed group of friends.

You try to make it sound as if zh.wikipedia is devoid of all life
except for the lone Wikipedian here and there - that's ridiculous.

If neither you, nor Yacht, nor Mountain, nor Shizhao, nor any of the
other important figureheads are planning to defect to a fangyan-pedia,
there's probably not much to worry about - that means that a minimal
amount of "lesser" users will move rather than a significant one. (and
again, I believe that especially with Wu the situation would be
similar to that between hi: and kn:)

Nishishei is the head of a slowly growing online BBS about
"zanhe-ëwo", so if he starts alone he wil surely find other users
easily (this is how scn.wikipedia reached its present state - I
motivated one person and he motivated everybody else)

If Nishishei really wants to work on a Wu Wikipedia, and he can draw
other editors/readers, then why do you want to redirect his efforts to
zh.wikipedia? That's a bit selfish.

Mark

On Fri, 28 Jan 2005 15:11:49 +0800, Andrew Lih <andrew.lih at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 21:27:58 -0700, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> > People like you are far too worried about the "disproportionately
> > small"-ness of zh.wikipedia. Given the small percentage of zh.wiki
> > users that would actually gravitate to a new Wikipedia of this type,
> > it would make almost no difference in the size of zh.wiki, and zh.wiki
> > is already huge (it used to have a few hundred articles, then 10k
> > would've been huge, but now it just has got to be bigger or it is way
> > too small) and is growing at a good enough rate that such a minor draw
> > away from it would be compensated for completely in less than two
> > months.
> 
> With all due respect, this is selective spin.
> 
> 19,000 articles is decent, but it's not "huge."
> 
> Most everyone in the ZH community knows the periodic inaccessibility
> in the PRC starting in June 2004 has hurt growth, so every dedicated
> member is important. If you look at the stats, only at the end of last
> year did ZH get "active wikipedians" back to the level of May 2004.
> There are only about 40 "very active" Wikipedians, and the number of
> "new Wikipedians" has not recovered, regressing back to February 2004
> levels.
> 
> A wiki with one person can be a very lonely place. Seems a better use
> of resources to have the Suzhou, Hangzhou, Wu (linguistics) and
> related pages in better shape, than to start a new Wikipedia with one
> person.
> 
> http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/苏州
> http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/杭州
> http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/吴方言
> 
> --
> Andrew Lih (User:Fuzheado)
>