Mark Clements wrote:
Authoritative. This has nothing to do with the
internal
systems, but with external impressions. If a user thinks of
Wikipedia as an authoratitive resource, they are unlikely to add
stubs because they assume that the content is already there
(they just haven't managed to find it) or has been deliberately
omitted.
Perhaps there is a "law" (of nature) that some 20,000 stubs will
always be tolerated. For a new Wikipedia, that is the whole site.
For a Wikipedia of 200,000 articles, it's only 10% of them.
One way to encourage longer articles would be to rank languages on
the
www.wikipedia.org front page by word count (or perhaps byte
count) rather than article count. According to [1] the Chinese
Wikipedia has 50.6 M words in March 2007 and the Russian has 47.1
M words, compared to the Swedish Wikipedia's 36.2 M words.
Changing the ranking of the Swedish one from 9th to 11th would
send a clear message to the stub-happy swedes.
[1]
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesDatabaseWords.htm
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik -
http://aronsson.se