[Wiktionary-l] Wiktionary quality issues

[Rovdyr]

Hi,
I would like to draw your attention to one issue. We should think about the
aim of the project. If we allow to create enormous amount of stubs it has a
lot of effects. I definitely agree that it helps to fill in quite difficult
Russian template, and that they have less work to do checking articles
crated by newcomers. However, it might influence the way the Russian
Wiktionary is perceived. It seems obvious to me that all projects aim at
being reliable sources. Users expect that a dictionary saying it has over
100 000 entries actually has them. If 8 out of 11 words they check at a time
are in completely empty articles they probably will not come back to the
dictionary as it is a waste of time for them. The same is with interwiki
links. People often want to compare articles. Russians write them really
fantastic, I like the kind of very specific and precise information they
give, but empty templates are really discouraging. I would even dare to say
that leading people to empty pages through interwiki is like not respecting
them. I write this all because I believe that Wiktionaries are created to
serve people and that they should be as ergonomic as possible.

While looking through posts, here and at Russian Wiktionary, connected with
the topic I came across the idea that templates show how much there is to do
and encourage people to fill them in. Well, if we knew how much not
registered users search through Wiktionaries and add any sort of information
with comparison to ones that do not we could say to what extend it is true,
but as we do not know (or we do?) it is safer to assume that a user rather
searches for information than is willing to share his knowledge.

Somebody also mentioned that templates may function as spell-checker,
articles may just inform you that a word exists as such. But who really
needs that considering the fact that everybody have Windows Word or
OppenOffice Writer with pretty good spell-checker that moreover suggest
correct spelling?

I liked the idea that bot would recognise a mark telling it is an empty
template and then would not link to it. Is it possible to do?

I am so against leaving lacunas, because we have great opportunity to use
Wikipedia's reputation of a very good source of information, and I am
worried that by doing such things as Russians do we may spoil it.


I wonder what do you think.
Helena Polyak / Rovdyr (PL)