[Wikipedia-l] RFC: Principles of mass content adding on small Wikipedias

[Lars Aronsson]

Andreas Vilén wrote:

> Before rushing into this stub maniac, please think! Is it really 
> a good idea to massadd substubs?

Instead of introvertly "thinking" about it, if anybody would 
actually make a scientific study of growth strategies of various 
wikis (or languages of Wikipedia), I'm afraid they would find that 
adding lots of stubs actually does pay off, at least in the short 
run.  It makes the website a bigger target for search engine 
queries, and this draws a bigger audience, from where contributors 
are recruited.  Creating a stub entry for every little town in the 
country where the language is spoken, or for every semi-famous 
person that speaks the language, can fill gaps that other websites 
in the same language didn't cover.  The importance of this effect 
depends heavily on how many other websites already exist in the 
language.  For English, when Wikipedia started in 2001, IMDb.com 
already covered most every actor and film director.  But in German 
this was not the case, and the German Wikipedia filled a really 
big gap during its rapid growth in 2002-2004.  I think there can 
be a really big advantage in taking the substub track to growth.  
If you want to stay on the quality track, you will need really 
strong policies and actions.

For Swedish, one can say that susning.nu absorbed the substub 
phase during its rapid growth in 2002-2003, and this has been used 
as an argument to do something better with the Swedish Wikipedia.


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se