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.
The amount of information in each word varies from language to
language, so that doesn't work too well. It works for comparing
similar languages, but Chinese and Swedish could end up having very
different numbers of words for exactly the same content.