Episode 45: BLP’s Revisited
* Andrew Lih
* Tawker
* [Not] Privatemusings
Topics this week
* Wikipedia unblocked in China
* 100 x 5,000
o After Wikipedia reached 10,000,000 global articles on March 27 (see archived story), the Kapampangan Wikipedia became the 100th Wikipedia to reach 5,000 articles on April 2.
o Showing the growth of smaller-language Wikipedias, the 100th Wikipedia to reach 100 articles was the Nahuatl Wikipedia in June 2005 (see archived story); June 2006 saw the 100th to reach 1,000 articles, the Venetian Wikipedia (see archived story). In April 2006, about 73.4% of existing articles were located on the Top 10 Wikipedias; since then, only 59.4% of the new articles created over the last two years were on Top 10 Wikipedias.
* Provisional Volunteer Council – proposal sent to the Board
o effeietsanders
* Multilingual stats recap
o Hello, I would like to hear in WW more about the Wikipedia language versions, what happens in e.g. the Japanese or the Finnish Wikipedia. en:User:Ziko-en
o http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Multilingual_statistics
o how does Volapuk, a conlang, have 115,000 articles, 112,000 added just this year?
* Wikimedia blog
* Wikimedia Foundation board meeting
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BOO
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partionable?!
that would have made more sense if you’d said, “every user would have to download the 133gigabyte full-edit-history dump, in order for a program to analyze any part of it.”
Comment by samuel — April 21, 2008 @ 4:39 am
There was a question here about the astounding growth of the Volapuk Wiki. I am an administrator on the Esperanto Wiki (another conlang) so I’ve been watching the Volapuk like they are a bad neighbor bringing down property values in the neighborhood.
Yes, the panel was right, Volapuk was the work of a bot run amok. The bot operator Smeira (the only active member of the Volapuk community) said that he wanted to artificially inflate his numbers to advertise the Volapuk language. Please note there are an estimated 20 speakers of this language world-wide.
The bot-operator essentially took databases of geographic data combined it with data out of the various wikis, and fed them to his bot and out spat a bunch of articles. Unfortunately, last I checked, the bot wasn’t well-controlled, and many of the pages were filled with leftover vestiges of text and broken templates where the article was stolen from. So, yes, there are 115000 stubs there, but they probably wouldn’t be considered quality stubs by the other 19 Volapukists of the world.
Since the guy started there have been a couple of failed attempts to get him to stop puffing up the scores in the form of Requests for Deletion at Meta. In the second proposal, Jimmy Wales himself has asked them to stop it and play nice, but stopped short of declaring an edict to close it down. I think both of those proposals were defeated by Smeira’s bringing in outside voters to support his position, and browbeating everyone that disagreed with him.
Essentially, the Volapuk Wikipedia is chock-full of geography stubs. 97% of their activity supports the bot-made cookie-cutter geography stubs.
The only good that I’ve seen come out of this is the Esperanto Wikipedia giving up bot-creation of articles cold-turkey. We have called a moratorium on new articles by bot, and we’re now creating articles the good old fashioned way. Yes, it’s slower, but there’s a big difference in quality.
Comment by Scott Starkey — May 1, 2008 @ 8:11 pm