Wikimedia Meta-Wiki

Cross-project comparisons

This page is to collect any efforts people have made to compare how different Wikimedia projects perform different tasks. This can be software design, community approach, policies, etc. Comparisons can be made across language communities within one project such as Wikipedia/Wikisource/Wikiquote/etc, or across projects within one language community (such as EN, DE, ZH), or both.

The benefit of comparing projects is to pool resources and learn from good examples of other people's work that you might not otherwise be exposed to.

In April 2007, the most significant effort was started with Category:Wikipedia_history to document unique practices in each Wikipedia.

See also:

Software

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All projects use the same version of MediaWiki. However, settings vary, e.g.:

  • case-sensitivity of first letter of page title

See limits to configuration changes.

Embedding images across projects, and embedding content on image pages, is possible if the image is on Commons.

Main page

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See Erik Zachte's gallery (warning: 15mb page). 214 Wikipedia 'Main Pages', reduced to 40% size, taken on December 30, 2005.

Welcome messages

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WelcomeNewcomer is an ancient wiki tradition and one of the core WikiPractices, present in all wikis.

On the Italian Wikipedia (and some other Italian language projects); unregistered users are welcomed too: either with #Thanks when they edit, or with the welcome IP template, automatically placed on all "expired" IP talk pages (once they're one month old). As of January 2014, it has about 350 thousands transclusions.

Thanks

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A variation of the welcome message for newcomers are the thanking messages, sometimes also implemented for editors – in order of increasing value – as stock extension thanks, #WikiLove messages or manual and specific barnstars.

On several wikis thanks messages/templates exist to thank and welcome unregistered users who edit pages, in order to make them register join the community. This is almost a WelcomeVisitor approach.

  • w:en:Template:Thanks
    • Counts made harder by substitution practice and by mass deletion of talk pages, but: $ bzgrep -E "(\{\{[Tt]hank|Thank you for lending your time to help us improve Wikipedia. If you are interested in editing more often than once in a while, we welcome you)" *meta-history*.bz2 | wc -l -> 532619 (December 2013) or 19010 considering only the last revision.
  • w:it:Template:Grazie (Screenshot showing the two-click thanking in it.wiki's patrolling tool LiveRC)
    • A quick search shows this has been used in about 30 thousands revisions as of December 2013: $ bzgrep -i "{{grazie" *meta-history*.xml.bz2 | wc -l -> 29646.
    • On it.wiki, IP talks are regularly purged but usually not deleted, though some deletion waves have been seen. Most IP talks are edited only once before purge. The number of revisions is therefore more or less the number of greeted persons.
  • w:de:Template:Danke
    • Present in about 46478 revisions as of December 2013. Deletion practices unknown.

WikiLove

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WikiLove is an established wiki paradigm (with a variant, WikipediAhimsa) but also the name of a tool to send greetings, enabled on a few wikis.

Babel

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User language information via babel templates or the Babel extension? Some silly bzgrep -c indicates that the usage of {{#babel}} is significant on most wikis; to have the total you should count how many {{babel}} are just (correct) wrappers of {{#babel}}. Not only on several huge wikis #babel is more used, but even where it's less used it usually grows more than the old template from one dump to the next (even on en.wiki new usages are comparable).

An idea might be to check which wikis with babel templates ( https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q5461620 ) use it only very little, and then deleting the templates on those wikis.

Future possibilities

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See also

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