Talk:Wikimedia News/archive 1

Whats wrong with Kölsch??

WiKoelsch - Kölsch language - is on the meta page under the

Test Wikipedias

10 Ripuarian languages (incl. Kölsch) - WiKoelsch

Stats page shows it has reahed 2008 pages.

So I put it in NEWS for the 7th of february 2006 that it had reached 2000 pages.

According to the rules that say that 2K is a milestone of general interest.

Then somebody takes it out again.

Why? Isnt news about Test wikipedias that are on the front page real news of interest to the wikipedia community?

Togrim, user of the norwegian Wikipedia, 2006-02-07.

Vietnamese milestone

Okay, Lincher, we can make the item shorter, but why not include a little extra info, so that this page isn't so boring? All that ever goes on this page are the cookie-cutter "The ______ Wikipedia has reached ______ articles" items. That's the reason behind the recommendation to "Try mixing things up with other milestones, such as active users or new articles per day." – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 23:04, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

If you're looking for something special to say, why not say something about the impressive rate of article count increase of the Albanian Wikipedia? They have had a recent surge in article creation that just today netted them their 5,000th article. 69.153.249.101 17:19, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

I have taken a look at the Albanian Wikipedia. I would advice you to translate the sitenotice. That gives a bad first impression. Congratulations with your 5000 mark. --Walter 21:23, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

milestones

these "races" are funny and it's interesting to see how different languages promote each project: in wikitionarys, french ang gallician versions are better placed than its wikipedias, in wikibooks...

For the first time I am aware of another language has surpassed English in one of the projects. French now officially has more articles than English in the Wiktionary. --63.73.132.2 20:53, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

I'm actually surprised at how well the Polish language projects are doing, and the fact that their growth seems to be somewhat higher than many of the other languages. It is in the top 10 of all of the projects and often in the top 5. --Roberth 04:44, 11 March 2006 (UTC)

Are all the milestones up to date? I'm guessing they aren't checked too often. :p Esteffect 23:47, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

Job queue at vi:

For lack of news from the Vietnamese Wikipedia:

14

• The Vietnamese Wikipedia's job queue reached 74, an all-time high since the statistic was added to the statistics page.

:^)

 – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 02:52, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

Ack, it just went up to 1,116! – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 10:33, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

Yay for changing templates that are used on almost every page... 2,083 items in the Vietnamese job queue... – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 05:26, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

2,420... – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 04:12, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

3,060... – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 07:23, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

48,369 in the Ripuarian Wikipedia job queue at June 8th, 2006, with only some 3,300 Articles, and some 11,000 total pages, after repeated addtions to some of the most central Macros in the Template: name space. -- Purodha Blissenbach 14:26, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

Icelandic 10,000+ milestone

The Icelandic Wikipedia reached 10,000+ articles, this is not announced.
Also the Greek Wikipedia will probably reach 10,000 articles today or tomorrow (only 12 articles missing now). 18:58, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

Taking the NEWS out of Wikimedia news!

Today Thai got 5000 users.

I posted this, it was removed and reinstated (why?)

Then Greek rounded 10 000 articles. Nice.

However,

• Piedmontese rounded 100 articles - a milestone that ought to

be posted. I did so, however it was removed?

then

• Tetum passed 100 too. Nothing on news.

People like me have been denied the right to post. Ive posted lots of news like this - nothing frivolous, genuine milestones only.

In general, I cant see that there has been much trouble with frivolous and wrong postings on this list. So why fix something that aint broken?

Im a passionate follower of the languages statistics list. (Ive written about languages on the net as a journalist.)

The reason to have a Wikipedia NEWS list is that there is gonna be NEWS there. Now the list is less valuable, as it seems only milestones about BIG languages is posted (and that is easy to detect anyway) and there will be a greater time gap between the passing of a milestone and the (maybe) posting to News.

Why?

Togrim, user of the norwegian wikipedia, 2006 05 15

Your additions were never removed: according to the page history, your additions were never submitted successfully. Perhaps you encountered a "session info lost" error and forgot to resubmit your changes? I added in the Tetum and Piedmontese milestones after noticing their milestone on my own, with the help of this page, which used to be the source for List of Wikipedias. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 18:05, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Polish has passed 50 000 users - but I cant post it to News

This is a LARGE and UNUSUAL milestone.

One day ago, Id have immediately posted it to Wikipedia news.

However, Im not allowed to.

So this makes Wikipedia news a better news sources for those of us who are interested?

Why?

Togrim, user of the norwegian wikipedia, 2006 05 15

Still nothing about polish rounding 50 000 users. News? Why arent we ordinary wikipedia grunts allowed to post such things, like before? Togrim, user of the norwegian wikipedia, 2006 05 15

What do you mean you're not allowed to? According to the page history, you never added it to the page. Perhaps you got one of those "session info lost" errors and forgot to resubmit your changes? – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 17:53, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Okay, I've added in the information about the Polish Wikipedia. Apparently they also reached 20,000 uploaded files on the same day. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 18:01, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Limburg Wiki has reached 2000 articles

A recogniced milestone, and nobody posts it. I used to take note of especially small language milestones, but now I cant.

Togrim, user of the norwegian wikipedia, 2006 05 17

Togrim, please add these milestones yourself. There's nothing stopping you. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 23:09, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

Dear Nguyen, yes there is. Earlier this week I could do so, now the system is changed and Im not allowed to post changes. that is the whole problem! Togrim, 2006 05 18

Serbokroat Wikipedia has reached 4000 articles

Togrim, user of the norwegian wikipedia, 2006 05 17

German Wikipedia has reached 400 000 articles

18 May 2006

Slovak Wikiquote has reached 2000 wikiq

please, make slovak update, thx. (2000 wikiquotes). ham

Wolof Wikipedia has reached 100 aricles

before this stupid change was made I could have posted this. Now Im forbidden to do so. Less NEWS in the News! Togrim, 2006-05-18

This article was semi-protected. i have unprotected it pending discussion. It was protected by User:Walter "so we know who is putting those numbers here". I think this is highly inappropriate, especially without discussing it first. Looking at the history, it's not very vandal-prone at all. Tuf-Kat 02:55, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

It was? Oops, sorry, Togrim, I didn't realize it. There should've be a message for users who are allowed to edit, but I guess I've become so accustomed to it that my eyes ignored it. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 05:28, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

Tnx for fixing the proble, Tuf-Kat, no reason to be sorry Ning Nguyen. All is well that ends well! Im a news freak (pro journalist, too ...) and find the list very interesting, then I saw, as it has been mentioned here, that there didnt seem to be much vandalism on the News here? So, as the USonians say: If it aint broken, why fix it? all the best to you, Togrim 2005-05.19

Min Nan Wiktionary

The Min Nan Wiktionary has already reached 250 articles last May 24, the milestone article is zh-min-nan:wikt:person.

MediaWiki โอเพ่นซอร์ส Wiki

เบื้องหลังความยิ่งใหญ่ของสารานุกรมเสรีออนไลน์ที่ยิ่งใหญ่แห่งนี้ คือ ซอฟต์แวร์โอเพ่นซอร์สที่มีคุณภาพสูงมากตัวหนึ่งที่จะนำมาแนะนำในวันนี้คือ MediaWiki ซึ่งมีจุดเริ่มต้นจากความต้องการสร้างเว็บไซต์ Wikipedia นั่นเอง โดยดำเนินการพัฒนาภายใต้ GNU General Public License ซอฟต์แวร์ตัวนี้จึงเกิดจากการร่วมแรงของชาวโลกเพื่อประโยชน์ส่วนรวมของชาวโลกจริงๆ นอกจากจะได้ผลเป็นเว็บไซต์ Wikipedia ที่มีประโยชน์ต่อทุกวงการอย่างเอนกอนันต์แล้ว เรายังได้ซอฟต์แวร์ MediaWiki ที่เป็นชุดโปรแกรม Wiki ชั้นเลิศอีกด้วย แน่นอนครับถ้าเรานำโปรแกรม MediaWiki มาสร้างเว็บไซต์ Wiki เป็นของเราเอง จะทำให้เราได้ Wiki ที่มีหน้าตาละม้ายคล้ายกับ Wikipedia.org อย่างไม่ต้องสงสัยเลย

Want to watch?

For the past year or so I've been helping to maintain the table of article milestones at Wikipedia. Part of that has involved posting monthly "heads-up" messages about languages that are about to reach their next milestone. Lately, though, I get the feeling that not that many people are actually watching that page (the talk page, I mean — not the table itself, which is "included" on two other pages at Wikipedia and so has some level of visibility), so my efforts are perhaps not as useful as they perhaps could be. What follows is my latest "watching" post from w:Wikipedia talk:Milestone statistics (interested parties can see the various "Watched in whatever month" messages on that talk page for more background). I was thinking I could post such messages here on this talk page, as well (except I wouldn't bother "archiving" each month's "watching" post here as I do over there). Alternatively, I could just post a bare list of languages to watch, with a link to the other talk page for more info. What do you think? Note, BTW, that I only take into account "milestones" displayed at w:Wikipedia:Milestone statistics, which doesn't include many of the milestone levels used on this page. - dcljr 21:16, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

Languages in need of watching

Based on trends in article counts seen at List of Wikipedias, the following languages are the ones most likely to need promoting in the table this month (July 2006):

• Estonian (et:) will reach 20,000
• Bosnian (bs:) will reach 10,000
• Serbo-Croatian (sh:) will reach 5,000
• Yiddish (yi:) will reach 2,000
• Simple English (simple:) might reach 10,000
• Franco-Provençal/Arpitan (frp:) might reach 2,000
• Scottish Gaelic (gd:) might reach 2,000

The following are less likely, but possible promotions:

• Russian (ru:) might possibly reach 100,000
• Neapolitan (nap:) might possibly reach 20,000
• Luxembourgish (lb:) might possibly reach 10,000
• Vietnamese (vi:) might possibly reach 10,000
• Haitian (ht:) might possibly reach 5,000
• Venetian (vec:) might possibly reach 5,000
• Faroese (fo:) might possibly reach 2,000
• Ilokano (ilo:) might possibly reach 2,000
• Javanese (jv:) might possibly reach 2,000
• Piedmontese (pms:) might possibly reach 2,000
• Uzbek (uz:) might possibly reach 2,000

And these are the most likely newcomers to the table:

• Norman (nrm:) will reach 1,000
• Friulian (fur:) will almost certainly reach 1,000
• Swahili (sw:) will probably reach 1,000
• Uyghur (ug:) will probably reach 1,000
• Armenian (hy:) might possibly reach 1,000
• Ligurian (lij:) might possibly reach 1,000

Note that within each list above, the entries are given in decreasing order of certainty ("will", "will almost certainly", "will probably", "might", "might possibly"), then in numerical decreasing order by milestone, then finally in alphabetical order.

Finally, a few nitty-gritty details: The given levels of certainty are based on how often in the last 5 checks of article counts (made approximately every 1 or 2 weeks) the wiki grew at a sufficient rate (in articles per day) that, if the rate were continued from now to the end of the month, the wiki would reach its next milestone. If every single time the wiki's articles/day rate was checked it was growing fast enough, then it is said the wiki "will" reach the milestone. If only 4 of the last 5 times showed sufficient growth, then it is said it "almost certainly" will reach it; and so forth. This method is probably slightly biased in favor of saying a wiki will reach the next milestone, but that's better, IMO, than being biased against it. - dcljr 21:16, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

News to be moved somewhere

I've removed this item from the page (it was under July 21):

• Wikipedia is refered by a Japanese economist, Yukio Noguchi in his column for Weekly Diamond (Japanese magazine). Noguchi compares the credibility of Wikipedia with validity of market price in view of market efficiency theory. According to him, those can be characterized as "synthesized opinion of multiple anonyms" and correct in many cases, but sometimes incorrect (e.g. price in bubble).

since it's not the kind of "news" usually placed here. It should be moved somewhere else. Not sure where. - dcljr 08:00, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

English Wikipedia about to reach 5 million pages

Might want to be on the lookout for the English Wikipedia reaching 5 million pages total. It currently stands at 4,991,962. - dcljr 08:12, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

It has passed the mark. Most likely later that day (UTC) on the 26th. - dcljr 01:04, 28 July 2006 (UTC)

English Wiktionary to 150K twice

This page announces the English Wiktionary reaching 150,000 entries twice, on June 5th and 12th. I assume that's because it passed the milestone, then dipped below it due to deletions, then passed it again. If so, that should probably be noted in the June 12th entry. - dcljr 08:17, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Keep watching the skies!

Well, since I didn't receive any responses to my "Want to watch?" and "Languages in need of watching" posts above, I won't bother posting my "watching" messages here, but just remind people once again that they appear monthly (more or less) at Wikipedia talk:Milestone statistics, so people can watch that page if interested. - dcljr 23:54, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

Boring facts

Voevoda, I noticed you removed all the milestones about the Vietnamese-language projects from the past week, calling them "boring facts". The top of Wikimedia News encourages us to "Try mixing things up with other milestones", and that's exactly what I was trying to do by adding those milestones in. They're not article milestones, but that doesn't make them "boring". Why weren't the blurbs about the Dutch Wikipedia reaching 220,000 articles, or the Indonesian Wikipedia reaching 29,000 articles, or the Korean Wikipedia reaching 26,000 articles, or the Korean Wiktionary reaching 9,500 entries removed?

If this page were reserved for article count milestones, why not get rid of the page and replace it with links to List of Wikipedias, Wiktionary#Recent changes for all Wiktionaries, List of Wikibooks, etc.? Without other types of milestones, this page would have become so predictable that someone could save us the trouble of maintaining this page by writing a bot to keep it updated.

With all that said, I'd like to re-add two of the three milestones that you removed:

• Lê P. Nam uploads the Vietnamese Wikipedia's 4,000^th file, the cover of a CD featuring the pianist Władysław Szpilman.
• Thuyvv becomes the 300^th registered user at the Vietnamese Wiktionary.

 – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 00:51, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

wiktionary

catalan wiktionary has reached 1000 articles, can you move it to the correct section? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 62.175.92.75 (talk • contribs) 07:35, 21 September 2006 (UTC).

Year stubs

I've noticed that very many of our editions have inflated their article counts by creating countless year "articles". These articles are typically created by bot, and usually contain only a sentence ("394 is a year"), some headings ("Events", "Births", "Deaths"), and a stub template. I've done a quick survey of the Wikipedia editions that have over 5,000 articles, to see which ones have generated such articles using bots:

en	no
de	no
fr	no
pl	yes
ja	no
nl	yes
it	yes
pt	yes
sv	no
es	yes
ru	yes
zh	no
fi	no
no	no
eo	no
sk	yes
da	yes
cs	no
he	no
ca	no
hu	no
ro	no
sr	no
id	yes
tr	yes
sl	no
lt	no
bg	yes
uk	no
ko	no
et	no
hr	yes
gl	no
ar	no
nn	no
te	no
ms	no
th	no
fa	no
el	no
eu	yes
io	no
nap	yes
is	no
bs	no
simple	no
ka	yes
lb	yes
bn	yes
sq	yes
br	no
mk	yes
wa	no
ht	no
la	no
sh	no
scn	no
af	no
ku	no
mr	no
ast	no
uz	yes
lv	no
cy	yes

Most of the editions that are marked "no" above still have thousands of year stubs generated manually, or by a bot running on the same account as a human. When I have the time, I'll come back and list the bots that are responsible for these stubs. I found only a handful of editions that don't yet have year stubs, most of them understandably below 10,000 articles.

Of course I'm biased in bringing this issue up, since the Vietnamese Wikipedia (where I'm also an administrator) has deliberately avoided creating these stubs. But I strongly believe that the Wikipedia editions with these year stubs are reflecting poorly upon Wikipedia as a whole. When Baidu Baike was launched, some Wikipedians commented on the site's use of Uncyclopedia articles to inflate their article count. Similarly, when the Encyclopedia of Earth was launched, some Wikipedians noted the site's extensive inclusion of articles straight from the National Institute of Standards and Technology. If the year stub trend keeps up, the Wikipedia portal may need a disclaimer at the bottom about actually having content in these articles...

Think of the user. When a Basque-speaking student wants to learn about the year 495 BC, to they really want to know that K. a. 495 was divided into milliseconds (milisegundo)? Kindly ignore the fact that such a unit never existed back then, but they're really starting to miss the point, having created thousands upon thousands of entirely useless stubs that get counted as "articles".

 – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 19:59, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

I don't see any problem with creating year articles by bots. There is also no question of "inflating" article counts. Nobody is having a race here, right? The advantage of using those bots to create year articles is that people get tired of creating year articles manually by clicking on the red links one by one. I wrote many of the date articles manually, and that was awefully boring to do all the typing. Later whenever a bio article is created, we go back to the date page to include it inthe birth/death places.

The same thing would happen with year articles , i.e. they will get filled up with content. This is true of all stub articles. Under your logic, all wikipedias are guilty of "inflating" article counts with stub-articles!! That's not right, because articles are not born with a featured article richness, rather they continue to grow from an empty stage. Yeah, it takes time. We have to live with that.

I also don't see how many wikipedias can be "inflating" article counts, as there are only 2000 + year articles (CE), so at most, even considering the BC articles, a wikipedia can have at most 3000 or so year articles.

I'd rather create a structured stub beforehand for others to fill in, than handle 2000 manually created pages with very different look and feel. And, if you say manual creation of those articles will be facilitated by template substitutions, then what's the difference between those and autogenerated articles?

The bottom line is, using bots is better in this case to generate a uniform look and feel for those year pages. Worried that they are empty? They WILL get filled up pretty soon. Just like all those other stubs.

BTW, to save you some time, I am an admin in Bengali wikipedia, and 75% of the years were created using RagibBot. This was after we faced the frustration of creating the rest of the 25% year pages painstakingly by hand, often resulting in non-uniform look and feel. --Ragib 20:41, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

Now that I looked into it, some of your observations are not completely correct. For example, you mention in the table that English wikipedia did not use bots to create year stubs. I request you to look into this diff. You can see that most of the year articles shown in the diff were created by one person, and they WERE just empty stubs when they were created. Looking further into the timestamp, I'm almost sure that a bot was used. Look into the year articles 4 years from then. now you see these full articles, with a lot of details of incidents, birth and deaths. That's exactly what will happen in case of all these new language wikis too. --Ragib 20:50, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

And, I just checked German wikipedia, which also seems to have acquired almost all the articles I checked randomly, via automated stub creations, back in 2002. The empty sections have been filled up since then. I'm sure almost all the other wikipedias you marked "no" above in the table, also created the year stubs in the same manner, and they were also empty stubs at the time of creation. --Ragib 21:13, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

(Edit conflict.) I'm not against creating stubs! I'm just against creating hundreds or even thousands of stubs (actually substubs) that have hardly any chance of being filled with useful information. Every now and then I take a random look at some of these stubs, and years like 1839 BC barely have a chance of being expanded. In my opinion, the bot owner should at least make the effort of generating birth/death lists based on the category system or Persondata project of a larger Wikipedia. The Vietnamese Wikipedia tried the approach you mentioned before: we created 365 day stubs. After they were created, there was probably less activity on date articles than before the entries were created. Many users like the instant gratification that comes with creating a new article by hand and seeing the article count increment a little, but might not be so interested in adding a line to an existing article. That's why I started a Persondata project at that wiki, so that eventually we'll have enough data to create useful date entries.

You can do a lot with bot-created articles, if that's really how you want to create your articles. When the Vietnamese Wiktionary started importing over a hundred thousand entries from an open-source dictionary, we decided to generate more information of our own. Using ParserFunctions, we created a template that would automatically transcribe Vietnamese words into the International Phonetic Alphabet, for the pronunciation section. We had PiedBot generate "paronym" lists, which are like rhyme lists for Vietnamese. And we're working on ways to analyze words to produce etymologies where possible ("re-educate" is made of "re-" and "educate", for example). Of course, many of these techniques don't apply to Wikipedia, but you don't have to stick with just creating headings and a stub template.

Also, I said that what I did earlier was a "quick survey". That means that I went to random years (both AD and BC) and checked whether the user that created the entry had "bot" in their name or had a userpage that looked like a bot's. Going through the wikis, only five or so didn't have lots of year entries; with the exception of the largest Wikipedias, the others all had lots of one-liners. I suppose you think that these wikis will have enough manpower to expand the year stubs, and I hope you're right, because that would be wonderful.

The reason I brought this whole topic up was not because I consider this some race. However, I sense a little pressure to create all these year stubs and send the article count upwards, and that runs completely contrary to Jimmy Wales' call to focus on quality, not quantity. Those who opposed Rambot's addition of census articles ("too formulaic") would be appalled.

I understand your concern about standardizing the year articles, but the English Wiktionary has a nice way of standardizing its entries without resorting to templates. Try searching for "substub". All you need is a somewhat prominent page that provides prefilled entries. When someone wants to create a new year template, you could use bn:MediaWiki:Newarticletext to direct them to the prefilled entry page. MediaWiki now comes with enough technology that resorting to these bots for quick stub creation shouldn't be necessary.

 – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 21:32, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

If the Bengali Wikipedia community is prepared to do all of the work necessary for expanding all the year stubs, then I wish you luck! But many other Wikipedias are still struggling with the task of wikifying and categorizing all the non-year articles that come in without the presence of these stubs. I've noticed these year stubs for months, but I've only written this now because I haven't noticed a concerted effort to actually do anything about the stubs at many of these Wikipedias. Something similar could be said about the English Wikipedia's Rambot articles, but at least they all have quite a bit of verifiable information. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 21:37, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

As a point of reference, the Vietnamese Wikipedia has more than twice the edit-per-page ratio that the Bengali Wikipedia does. Discounting the year stubs that RagibBot created, the ratio would be about 0.2% higher. That doesn't seem like much, but at least for the Vietnamese Wikipedia, it would take a few months to recover those 0.2%. That's considering that the Vietnamese Wikipedia has almost 20 times the users that the Bengali Wikipedia has. And for what it's worth, I think RagibBot's creation of Indian placename stubs is a much better idea. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 22:04, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

I don't think you can compare the edit counts of Vietnamese wikipedia with those of Bengali wikipedia right now. We are still building a community, in which Vietnamese wikipedia has had a head start of almost 2.5 years. And the year/date articles do get filled up gradually. We DO have people going over bio-pages and filling out the date articles with the info. Same goes for birth/death year cateories. So, I'm pretty sure these years (note that BC years were not added yet to bn-wiki) will get filled up given enough time. I understand your concern about empty or small pages, but every wikipedia started that way, right? --Ragib 22:17, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

Right; it's just my observation, though, that people fill up biographies, geographical articles, and scientific/technology articles much faster than less topic-based articles like years and dates. If I assume that the Bengali Wikipedia began when its second article was created (May 2004), the Vietnamese Wikipedia had only a 1½-year head start. And by February 2005, the Bengali Wikipedia had about caught up to the Vietnamese Wikipedia anyways. Around March and April 2005, we started growing rapidly not because of substubs, but because of genuine articles being written and translated. I'm not comparing the edit counts of the two editions, by the way: I'm comparing the edits-per-page ratio, which should be a much better (albeit imperfect) indicator of how much attention is being paid to each page. Actually, the bytes-per-page statistic is better, and it's 1,720 B for the Bengali Wikipedia and 5,806 B for the Vietnamese Wikipedia.

Anyhow, I didn't really have the Bengali Wikipedia in mind when I started this topic; I was really thinking of the Basque Wikipedia and all its year and locality stubs, all of which were one-liners. And the Telugu Wikipedia: their bytes-per-page ratio has dropped to 2,200 B, and that's before the huge influx of one-sentence Indian locality stubs.

 – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 22:40, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

By the way, if you think that year stubs "only" amount to 2,000+ articles, you might want to take a look at our couple-day-old Siberian-language Wikipedia, which boasts 5,531 articles. It's impressive, until you realize that thousands upon thousands of those "articles" are year stubs. You might find a couple hundred non-year-related articles, and they all seem to be short lists. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 00:59, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

It is all right, we open wikipedia and prepare place for work, it is no strange in it. We also plan generante some more stuff using bot. Why human should do things which are more suitable for bot? And we have many non-year related articles, which are not lists. --Yaroslav Zolotaryov 01:51, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

But that begs the question: would the human end up doing those things? Like I told Ragib, I don't think there's a problem if the Siberian Wikipedia community is prepared to fill in a lot of those year stubs. But are 28 users enough to do that? I think it's a little premature to create all those year stubs, because it makes the Siberian Wikipedia seem less like an encyclopedia and more like an almanac. Aren't there any other types of articles that you can create – articles that are more educational than ru-sib:1520, which just tells you that 1520 is after 1519 and before 1521?

Have you created all the country articles yet? If not, you could have a bot generate country articles based on the infoboxes at a larger Wikipedia. That's what CarlKenner did (by hand) for some of the smaller Wikipedias, after all.

 – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 05:20, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

Yes, soon our bots will generate more usefull stuff, years are only beginning. But why do not have everything in order and have all the years after wikipedia opening)) --Yaroslav Zolotaryov 06:18, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

Because it makes the article count misleading. Currently the Siberian wiki is listed under the "1,000+ articles" section of the Wikipedia portal, because it has over a thousand pages that MediaWiki counts as articles. Visitors who happen to speak Siberian could come to your wiki with the expectation that it contains a lot of information, because it has over a thousand articles. But can the Siberian Wikipedia compare with other wikis, like Min Nan and Urdu, that worked hard to write those thousands of articles? If the user clicks on Лучайна сторонка and see so many year stubs, they might suspect that the article count is meaningless and that the Siberian Wikipedia doesn't have that much after all. You might've lost a potential contributor. With all the criticism that Wikipedia gets these days, we can hardly afford to drive away more people. But what's done is done; I really hope you get a lot more useful articles soon, so that people can see that you're working on it. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 07:54, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

Are you sure you have enough contributors to expand the nearly 5,000 year stubs at the Siberian Wikipedia – and counting? I think you're getting ahead of yourselves. If it were Wiktionary, it wouldn't be such a big deal, because Wiktionary entries don't have to have a lot of information to be useful. But this is Wikipedia, and people go to Wikipedia to learn about a subject. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 01:15, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

It's not only about years. We really need to change our performance indicators.From one hand, having stubs may be nice, it really helps in capturing active audience, from the other hand, one risks boasting an enormous number of articles that simply are NOT there. So maybe we should put a size limit, or we could better count the global size of the database and the number of users having over 5 edits in the last month. IMHO this would give a more accurate picture, especially for starting projects. I try to do this when I give data to the press, but they never listen, because they prefer huge numbers. The final effect is quite risky, though. Readers may come, find nothing worth reading and simply forget about the project. It would be better for everybody's marketing if we told the general public what really is there. As long as we keep publishing a top ten based on article count alone we push people to use bots to enhance the visibility of their own project. No way out of that. --Bèrto 'd Sèra 10:50, 2 July 2007 (UTC)

Min Nan 5,000 landmark

The Min Nan Wiktionary has reached 5,000 entries with the addition of something in Hebrew script? Am I missing something? Grandmasterka 06:47, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Every Wiktionary edition has the goal of defining words in multiple languages. That's what we mean by calling Wiktionary "multilingual". Most of the Vietnamese Wiktionary's entries, for example, are about English words (Vietnamese comes in fourth). – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 07:06, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Hi! Our Wiktionary edition (Min Nan) has just made its 5,000th entry 2 days ago with bear. That news was a hoax. The number of articles on that time is approximately 3,500 entries. A-yao 07:16, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

Clarification about Nepal Bhasa Wikipedia

This is in response to the news on Wikimedia News page dated 11th October, 2006 with inclusion of my username. I think the line "Eukesh has been busy adding hundreds of year stubs and essentially blank pages, such as जेनेभा कन्भेन्सन, the 1,000th "article"." undermines my actions in Nepal Bhasa wikipedia.

Here is what I have to say:-

I do not care if the number of articles in Nepal Bhasa wikipedia is 1000 or 1 or -1000. I am not in this rat-race of having large number of articles in whatsoever way. It does not matter to me even if the Nepal Bhasa version is listed as having no articles at all. But now that people have developed concern over it with my username included, I think I need to clarify cretain things that are going on in Nepal Bhasa wikipedia to maintain a sense of morality here. Here are my clarifications of my actions so far in Nepal Bhasa wikipedia:-

• Nepal Bhasa wikipedia is in the phase of structural development and I am working accordingly. The blank pages created are pages mentioned in List of articles every Wikipedia should have. The blank pages were created in order to form an organized category list so that one need not have a volunteer categorizing the vital pages of the encyclopedia later on. For those of you who can not read in Devnagari, the 1000th article mentioned in the news page is "Geneva Convention" which is there in the list. Besides these, I have created several templates of medicine as I think that I can contribute to those pages.
• The 206 year pages from 1800 to 2006 were created to aid the navigation in history. These are the years of recorded history and hence useful for navigation. Well, two hundred years can be technically called hundreds but I think "Eukesh has been busy adding hundreds of year stubs..." is a bit exagerrated. Whosoever has added that remark, please modify it or talk to me about your concerns before making such statements. I think the statement clearly undermines my efforts in modifying navigation in not just Nepal Bhasa but in all other Devnagari wikipedias i.e. Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, Sanskrit, Romani, Pali and Kashmari where I have added several templates and navigation bars which have increased the navigation quality of these wikipedias.
• I have been working in infrastructural development of Nepal Bhasa wikipedia. My main concern at the moment is to ensure the proper navigation of the pages by categorization, portalization and redirection from Roman alphabets to their Devnagari counterparts and to make the Devnagari wikipedia more friendly to the dial-up users in South Asia. For this I am working along with other wikipedias as well. I have translated a navigation template named "Index" which is used for navigation not just in Nepal Bhasa but in all Devnagari wikis except Kashmiri where template is present but front page is locked and the admins havent placed the navigator in front page yet. Besides, aid in creating new articles and sequential flow from browsing article to creating the ones not present are being tried on.
• Not all pages created at the moment are blanks, special pages such as Portals which are rare in Devnagari wiki have been experimented successfully and will be functioning soon. Plus, creation of Embassy and Guthi Dabu (Community Portal) and other such pages have also started by now (the last part of my first phase).
• After the termination of this phase, I will proceed to add the photos and bits of information. Then, expand them slowly with adding of sub-headings and linking of pages. Exception to this flow are some articles which are vital and have been translated or are copied and pasted and are still present in the English form of the page.
• If developing a wikipedia in this planned and constructive manner hampers wikipedia or is in breach of any of the rules and protocols of wikipedia, please notify me and I shall terminate my actions.

Thank you.--Eukesh 21:33, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

Sorry for not noticing your comments earlier; this has been a busy week for me. I was the one who placed that item in Wikimedia News, and I'm sorry for making it seem as if I was blaming you for anything. I was not doing this in any official capacity (I have none), or even as an administrator at Meta, but just personally, as an observer. Also, the servers can definitely handle the additional pages, so you're not "hampering" Wikipedia in any way. So, no, you broke no rules, and I'm probably the only one who noticed. Perhaps I was just shocked that the Nepal Bhasa Wikipedia community would create so many articles with just category tags in them; I'd never seen something like that before. However, I have the same concerns about your additions that I did above.

I didn't mean to imply that you personally are in a "rat race", but I do find that increasing your wiki's article count by orders of magnitude will eventually cause newcomers to be disappointed. The Nepal Bhasa front page currently boasts of 1,115 articles. But that includes a very large number of pages that no print encyclopedia, nor any other online encyclopedia, would call an "article". So I'm worried that newcomers will see Nepal Bhasa listed under the 1 000+ section of the multilingual portal, then see the article count at your front page, and expect that new: has very many encyclopedic articles. If (hypothetically) they search for many of the basic articles that any encyclopedia should have, however, they'd quickly realize that the article count isn't telling them much, and they may not take the time to see what you do have at the site. It's almost as if the article count featured prominently on your front page is false advertising.

When I said "hundreds", I meant that you had created hundreds of year stubs and "essentially blank pages". Including those pages, there are indeed hundreds and hundreds. At the Vietnamese Wikipedia, where I spend the most time, we're also trying to form an organized category list – using the category system. This way the article count remains an accurate indicator of how much usable content we have, and we can still structure our site with minimal effort.

As it stands, the Nepal Bhasa Wikipedia has at least a thousand pages (including articles) that contain at most a template or category tag. Quickly browsing through Special:Longpages, it seems as if the wiki has 200 or so articles with actual readable prose. That's very good for a wiki that just started a month ago! But it's a far cry from the thousand or so that are included in the article count at the top of the new: front page. If you or the new: community intends to expand all these articles, I have nothing but encouragement to offer you. But just as I told Yaroslav above, with just 19 users, unless you plan on getting a massive influx of new contributors soon, you've got a huge task ahead of you. My suggestion: find a way to parse the infoboxes at the larger wikis, and use that data to generate content for year, date, country, state, province, city, river, asteroid, and airport articles. There are a lot of ways to generate readable prose for the Nepal Bhasa Wikipedia, and I really hope you'll employ these techniques instead of creating such minimalist articles.

Again, I'm sorry if posting that item seemed to put you at fault for your additions. I only intended to explain to the Wikimedia community why – or how – new: managed to grow so rapidly.

 – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 04:42, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

I've reworded the news item to sound less belittling of your efforts. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 04:46, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

Sorry for my late response but I was caught up with some other activities. You need not be sorry about reporting creation of blank pages. Many of the people do create useless blank pages. In fact, its good that someone noticed that such pages were being created. The major concern that I have is of lack of communication. The blank pages that I created were not essentially useless. Almost all of these pages need to be present in all wikipedia as stated by the list of artilces that every language should have in metawiki. These blank pages were created as a guide for the volunteers. A simple note in my discussion page could have prevented this misunderstanding. About the creation of templates and infoboxes, I would like to thank you for the suggestion. That is something I was planning to do along with adding photograph and other media. However, its not intended to increase the number of articles but to improve the quality of the "blank pages". About false advertisement, I do not think that 1000 articles is a big deal (about 110 chemical elements, 400 body parts/disease/health conditions, 200 nations, 50 cities, some weather conditions, some games, a few biographies and names of major fields of science can easily add upto more than 1000 articles and almost anyone can expand these basic articles) for any encyclopedia. I havent even listed the encyclopediae containing less than 10,000 articles in Nepal Bhasa version. I personally believe that metawiki should improve the list of articles all languages should have to create an article page where media are available (rather than linking them to the english or other language page) so that when a test wikipedia in incubator links to the metawiki page, a bot automatically transfers media to the wikipedia being tested in incubator. A test wikipedia can only qualify to be a wikipedia when it has linked to almost all the articles in the list so that the wikipedia has at least a few sentences, all media and basic navigation tools like templates and infoboxes in all the topics. I am working in Nepal Bhasa wikipedia to do a similar thing (although it is already a wikipedia rather than a test wikipedia). However, if you find the counter of articles in the main page offensive, it can be removed any moment. It was kept as a customary entity (present in almost all language wikipdia front page) not as an advertisement. The reason for low number of volunteers in Nepal Bhasa version is because a lot of interested volunteers do not know how to use wikipedia. We are about to hold a meeting and conduct some programs to educate these volunteers for this purpose as well as are planning for off-line editing and editing in dial-up and low speed connections. The talk of building encyclopedia in Nepal Bhasa is widespread now and if everything goes as per planned, it would not be difficult to sustain these 1000 articles. Thank you.--Eukesh 20:19, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm sorry for not going to you with my concerns before voicing them here. I meant to address a wider audience with these concerns: many wikis are employing similar techniques, and it's not clear to me that they want to improve the quality of their articles as you do. However, I shouldn't've made an example of your efforts for that purpose. Really, I'm glad to hear that you're interested in improving the quality of your articles. Going through new:Special:Random, I'm pleased to see more articles with actual text than before, but I still come across many pages like new:जैविक रसायनशास्त्र, which a non-wiki encyclopedia could never call an "article". I can't read Nepal Bhasa, so I don't know exactly what you call the 1,224 articles on the front page, but I guess it would help if that line doesn't imply that the 1,224 articles are complete in any way. That's probably more important for a wiki in which very short articles make up such a large proportion of the article count; although the English Wikipedia has hordes of stubs, the stubs still make up a small part of that wiki's overall article namespace, so calling them "articles" isn't a problem for the English Wikipedia. Since the multilingual portal is, well, multilingual, it wouldn't be practical to say anything about the quality of each wiki's "1 000+" articles, so it's up to the individual wikis to do that. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 21:29, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

• Thanks for understanding. Like I already pointed out earlier, most of these pages were created from the list of articles that all languages should have. The page which you pointed out translates as Biochemistry and it does not qualify as an article yet. What I am trying to do here is list out all the basic topics, classify them (which resulted in the formation of those "blank pages") and start working on them. It serves as a "framework" to work onto. The number of articles in Nepal Bhasa has not increased significantly in the recent days although the number of edits are not different from the previous days. This is because the most minimal framework (to make it count as a legitimate encyclopedia) is almost complete now. The framework is essential not just to guide me but also because Devnagari wikipediae (by default) do not operate in Devnagari input environment. The search page enabled in Latin is virtually useless. So, one has to link all the articles to navigate. This is one thing delaying development and prolonging the existence of blank pages. I am working on that with other Indic scripted wikipediae as well as with Arahimic wikipedia to enable Devnagari script and have achieved some success in the same. This project of enabling of Indic script is very likely to complete soon (but I am sure that the script enabling concept developed by Tatari of Arhimic wikipedia will create a revolution in wikipedia). I am hopeful that in a few months, most of these virtually blank pages which are serving as links now will be filled up with a minimal level of text. Once the Devnagari script is fully functional, they might even serve as Featured pages in near future.--Eukesh 20:34, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

catalan wiktionary

the catalan wiktionary has more than 1000 articles, can you please move it up? i wouldn't dare

I'm a Tor server :)

Hi now it's over 2000, move it again PLEASE

stupid milestones

There are some stupid milestones on this list like;

• number of total pages on a wiki
• number of registered users

That does not mean anything. Then you can also list the number bytes in the database dump of a wiki as a milestone. --Walter Do you have news? Report it to Wikizine 23:43, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

It's usually an attempt at mixing things up here. It's really monotonous to see "[Language] Wikipedia has reached [Multiple of 10] articles" 500 times on the same page. I'd argue that the number of registered users is a useful indication of the wiki's increasing use, and should be listed on this page. The number of bytes in the wiki's database dump is not a good comparison, because the database dump's size doesn't change as often as the number of articles (a dump is only created every now and then), and because it's not accessible from the wiki's Statistics page, so it's not like anyone's really watching. The dump size would be useful, however, when ranking Wikipedia editions, since it takes into account the editions that created thousands of one-line articles. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 22:48, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

What was the 5000th Irish language article

Interested to know the answer.

What's going on with Belarusian?

Sometime between March 25 and April 4, the Old Belarusian Wikipedia was created and apparently inherited all of the articles from the original Belarusian Wikipedia, meanwhile the number of articles in the latter (the original wiki) was cut roughly in half. Can someone explain what's going on over there? - dcljr 23:54, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

I think, whole Wikipedia that was proviously on be. was moved to be-x-old and on be. was created compleatly new one (with pages prepared in incubator) --Li-sung 08:13, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

The original bewiki, which has now been moved to be-x-old, is written in the so-called Tarashkevitsa, the "classical" Belarusan orthography of 1918, created by Branislaw Tarashkevich, while the new bewiki is in the orthography of 1959, which is the official one in contemporary Belarus. Please see Requests for new languages/Wikipedia Belarusian normative.--Johannes Rohr 05:34, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Well, the new be: is over 5,000 articles again (as of today, apparently), so I'm going to put today as the date it reached 5,000, since it's not a continuation of what's now at be-x-old:. - dcljr 08:15, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Any suggestion, how many of them are bot-generated stubs? I just hit alt-shift-x a number of times, and the picture is very disappointing. No surprise though, given that when this wiki left the incubator, it had just a few hundred articles. I don't really think that the fact that yet another wiki has generated 4000 empty year/date stubs is news worth reporting. --Johannes Rohr 10:42, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

When a wiki reaches a milestone, it gets reported, whether it did it with "real" articles or bot-generated stubs. - dcljr 22:09, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Although we should make a note when that's the case. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 20:52, 24 June 2007 (UTC)

Hmm

Is this somewhere for news other than how big the projects are? I wondered about posting some WMF items like 2007 Wikipedia Selection for Schools? --AndrewCates 08:49, 25 July 2007 (UTC)