On Thu, Sep 11, 2008 at 4:04 AM, Syagrius syagrius@caramail.com wrote:
Hello,
As Wikipedia decided to change its main page presentation, I think that Wikisource maybe should do the same. The "War" between the spanish and the chinese wikisources demonstrates that the article count does not reflect the true depht of a Wikisource, as someone can create thousands of very small articles. What should the main page present ? I don't think that, as Wikipedia did, chosing the number of visitors would be a good idea, since Wikisource is very less known than Wikipedia, and the figures may be not reliable. If these stats from Erik Zachte can be trusted (and renewed), I would suggest that the number of words http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikisource/EN/TablesDatabaseWords.htm may be the fairest figure to present. The only problem would be : is the number of words given for the Chinese (and Japanese, also) wikisource correct ?
It is an interesting statistic, and I havent investigated the algorithm being used. Is there a mathematical description of the algorithm used?
My first guess is that we would need to weight it according to the entropy of each language. For example, Chinese and Japanese have a much higher entropy, so they need to be weighted higher.
What do you think of this proposition ?
If we are going to change the front page of the portal, it is these stats that I would like to see used and improved:
http://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:ProofreadPage_Statistics
We need to present ourselves as a _serious_ project, doing top quality work.
I suggest that we also feature two texts on the main portal each month: - one work that is hosted on wikisource.org - i.e. from a language which is _not_ on a subdomain - one work from a subdomain, from a different sub-domain each month, _after_ it has been selected as a featured text on the subdomain.
-- John Vandenberg