5 ms·

Here's a comparison of all the versions of Wikipedia http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias#All_Wikipedias_ordered_by_number_of_articles http://meta

by tty 13y ago

Here's a comparison of all the versions of Wikipedia http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias#All_Wikipedias_ordered_by_number_of_articles http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias#All_Wikipe... Take a look at the "depth" column. Dutch and Swedish used to be your average Wikipedias, with article counts somewhere in the ~500k. They both decided that it was more important to have a higher article count so they now employ bots to create new articles with the bare minimum of data (sentence or two, pulled from other language Wikipedias). It usually becomes more extreme when there's some sort of milestone ahead. There's even worse offenders, for example Waray-Waray. I'm genuinely wondering whether Wikipedia should have a policy of deleting all such articles and disabling their creation. I don't think it's in the spirit of an encyclopedia.

baby 13y ago
I still think it's good because even if it doesn't provide good info, it links you to a list of articles in other languages that does. Providing you speak more than one language, it's very useful.
- netrus 13y ago
  Around 2006 my (German) high school teachers started to check Wikipedia articles for all essay topics they assigned. But they never checked the English or French articles. Good for me!
  - GFischer 13y ago
    I remember my high school teacher's first introduction to an online encyclopedia article - we were tasked with some writing, and one of my friends had this new "Encarta" software (that was 1994 or so). We made our homework in 15 minutes, proceeded to goof off all the afternoon, and blew away the teacher (we were intelligent enough to slightly modify it).
ronaldx 13y ago
Looking at how they calculate "depth", I would say it's just as likely measuring edit-wars. It's not evident that it's measuring quality and I don't think it should be used as a target or marker for quality. I often find myself clicking on the Dutch translation link - it regularly has more concise, useful data.
- tty 13y ago
  >I often find myself clicking on the Dutch translation link - it regularly has more concise, useful data. For content that you care about, perhaps. Not for the content that they use to raise the article count number. The latter is mostly made up of one to two sentence articles scraped from foreign Wikipedias. Oftentimes they're articles about towns in remote countries. Here's an example of such an article created by a bot http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abitanti http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abitanti
  - ronaldx 13y ago
    Same type of data all over English wikipedia, e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reeve,_Wisconsin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reeve,_Wisconsin The existence of those pages has no disadvantage and does not detract from the quality of the encyclopedia (if correct) - wikipedia itself points out that it is not a paper encyclopedia and there is no limit to the amount of content. I do not understand the disadvantage of listing Abitanti and providing its location within Slovenia.
    - simias 13y ago
      Maybe it's just not the kind of contents I expect to find in wikipedia, and as such is just click-bait since it's likely to be high in google search results? If I want to know the location of Abianti within Slovenia I'm more likely to turn towards some mapping website rather than wikipedia, where I'd expect a more detailed description of the city's history and other relevant information.
      - duskwuff 13y ago
simias 13y ago
What's the incentive of artificially inflating the article count? Is it just a stupid race to be "on top"?
- blowski 13y ago
  Once the article is created, it can appear in Google. Once it's in Google, it's more likely to have visitors and some of them might improve the article. I have no idea whether this was the rationale or even whether it's a good idea, but there might be more to their strategy than article count.
- trycatch 13y ago
  Partially it's just a stupid race, see e.g. page in Russian Wikipedia [1], completely dedicated to discussions of the "Wikipedias race", celebrating wins over other wikis, coordinating bot article creation, blaming competitors for "unfair" low-quality bot article uploads, etc. On the other hand, batch uploads are not completely useless -- batch-uploaded article stubs have consistent style, depth and quality (something that's hard to get with crowd-sourced articles), and with script-created articles it's possible to get exhaustive consistent coverage of boring topics like rivers, insects or villages. [1] http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9E%D0%B1%D1%81%D1%83%D0%B6%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B5_%D1%83%D1%87%D0%B0%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B0:Zserghei/%D0%93%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%BA%D0%B0 http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9E%D0%B1%D1%81%D1%83%D0%B6%... (title -- "Race")
Dosenpfand 13y ago
>Dutch and Swedish used to be your average Wikipedias, with article counts somewhere in the ~500k. They both decided that it was more important to have a higher article count so they now employ bots to create new articles with the bare minimum of data (sentence or two, pulled from other language Wikipedias). Interesting! The german wikipedia in comparison is doing the exact opposite and has very strict relevance criteria for new articles. http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.heise.de%2Fct%2Fartikel%2FWikipedia-Der-Kampf-um-die-Relevanz-846332.html http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=n&prev=... http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fflaschenpost.piratenpartei.de%2F2011%2F12%2F11%2Fwikipedia-die-relevanzdebatte%2F http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&tl=en&u=ht...
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
a3_nm 13y ago
> I'm genuinely wondering whether Wikipedia should have a policy of deleting all such articles and disabling their creation. I don't think it's in the spirit of an encyclopedia. Hopefully, it will soon be possible to generate such minimal articles automatically from the language-independent and structured data on Wikidata. At this point, hopefully, it will be possible to create just the stylesheets and get the data from Wikidata instead of populating small Wikipedias with bot-created articles; only the relevant work will remain (to be done on Wikidata in a language-independent way).
nemetroid 13y ago
This has worsened the "random article" feqture on Swedish Wikipedia by a lot. Try your luck, I bet you'll get a stub article about some insect: http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Slumpsida http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Slumpsida Regarding your suggestion: this is, after all, a decision made by the Swedish/Dutch Wikipedia community. I'm not familiar with Wikipedia's hierarchy, but I'm not sure that this is unencyclopaediac (?) enough for an outside intetvention to be a good idea.

by tty 13y ago

baby 13y ago

I still think it's good because even if it doesn't provide good info, it links you to a list of articles in other languages that does. Providing you speak more than one language, it's very useful.

netrus 13y ago
Around 2006 my (German) high school teachers started to check Wikipedia articles for all essay topics they assigned. But they never checked the English or French articles. Good for me!
- GFischer 13y ago
  I remember my high school teacher's first introduction to an online encyclopedia article - we were tasked with some writing, and one of my friends had this new "Encarta" software (that was 1994 or so). We made our homework in 15 minutes, proceeded to goof off all the afternoon, and blew away the teacher (we were intelligent enough to slightly modify it).

ronaldx 13y ago

Looking at how they calculate "depth", I would say it's just as likely measuring edit-wars. It's not evident that it's measuring quality and I don't think it should be used as a target or marker for quality. I often find myself clicking on the Dutch translation link - it regularly has more concise, useful data.

tty 13y ago
>I often find myself clicking on the Dutch translation link - it regularly has more concise, useful data. For content that you care about, perhaps. Not for the content that they use to raise the article count number. The latter is mostly made up of one to two sentence articles scraped from foreign Wikipedias. Oftentimes they're articles about towns in remote countries. Here's an example of such an article created by a bot http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abitanti http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abitanti
- ronaldx 13y ago
  Same type of data all over English wikipedia, e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reeve,_Wisconsin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reeve,_Wisconsin The existence of those pages has no disadvantage and does not detract from the quality of the encyclopedia (if correct) - wikipedia itself points out that it is not a paper encyclopedia and there is no limit to the amount of content. I do not understand the disadvantage of listing Abitanti and providing its location within Slovenia.
  - simias 13y ago
    Maybe it's just not the kind of contents I expect to find in wikipedia, and as such is just click-bait since it's likely to be high in google search results? If I want to know the location of Abianti within Slovenia I'm more likely to turn towards some mapping website rather than wikipedia, where I'd expect a more detailed description of the city's history and other relevant information.
    - duskwuff 13y ago

simias 13y ago

What's the incentive of artificially inflating the article count? Is it just a stupid race to be "on top"?

blowski 13y ago
Once the article is created, it can appear in Google. Once it's in Google, it's more likely to have visitors and some of them might improve the article. I have no idea whether this was the rationale or even whether it's a good idea, but there might be more to their strategy than article count.
trycatch 13y ago
Partially it's just a stupid race, see e.g. page in Russian Wikipedia [1], completely dedicated to discussions of the "Wikipedias race", celebrating wins over other wikis, coordinating bot article creation, blaming competitors for "unfair" low-quality bot article uploads, etc. On the other hand, batch uploads are not completely useless -- batch-uploaded article stubs have consistent style, depth and quality (something that's hard to get with crowd-sourced articles), and with script-created articles it's possible to get exhaustive consistent coverage of boring topics like rivers, insects or villages. [1] http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9E%D0%B1%D1%81%D1%83%D0%B6%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B5_%D1%83%D1%87%D0%B0%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B0:Zserghei/%D0%93%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%BA%D0%B0 http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9E%D0%B1%D1%81%D1%83%D0%B6%... (title -- "Race")

Dosenpfand 13y ago

>Dutch and Swedish used to be your average Wikipedias, with article counts somewhere in the ~500k. They both decided that it was more important to have a higher article count so they now employ bots to create new articles with the bare minimum of data (sentence or two, pulled from other language Wikipedias). Interesting! The german wikipedia in comparison is doing the exact opposite and has very strict relevance criteria for new articles. http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.heise.de%2Fct%2Fartikel%2FWikipedia-Der-Kampf-um-die-Relevanz-846332.html http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=n&prev=... http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fflaschenpost.piratenpartei.de%2F2011%2F12%2F11%2Fwikipedia-die-relevanzdebatte%2F http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&tl=en&u=ht...

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

a3_nm 13y ago

> I'm genuinely wondering whether Wikipedia should have a policy of deleting all such articles and disabling their creation. I don't think it's in the spirit of an encyclopedia. Hopefully, it will soon be possible to generate such minimal articles automatically from the language-independent and structured data on Wikidata. At this point, hopefully, it will be possible to create just the stylesheets and get the data from Wikidata instead of populating small Wikipedias with bot-created articles; only the relevant work will remain (to be done on Wikidata in a language-independent way).

nemetroid 13y ago

This has worsened the "random article" feqture on Swedish Wikipedia by a lot. Try your luck, I bet you'll get a stub article about some insect: http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Slumpsida http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Slumpsida Regarding your suggestion: this is, after all, a decision made by the Swedish/Dutch Wikipedia community. I'm not familiar with Wikipedia's hierarchy, but I'm not sure that this is unencyclopaediac (?) enough for an outside intetvention to be a good idea.