[Foundation-l] Quran in Sitenotice

Fri Jul 14 00:20:39 UTC 2006

Heema Khan wrote:
> On Urdu Wikipedia, article on Israel is very short:
> http://ur.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%A7%D8%B3%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%A6%DB%8C%D9%84
> I can translate it:

While the text is very short and not very well-written, one must 
bear in mind that ur.wikipedia.org has a total of 1490 articles 
and that every language of Wikipedia had short and bad articles at 
that early stage.  After submitting an article to such a small and 
young wiki site, the main frustration is not spelling errors, 
factual errors, slanted point of view or poor organization, but 
the fact that all wikilinks are red and not blue.  (In the case of 
ur:Israel, there are no links in the main wikitext, so the article 
still needs to be wikified.) The main "WikiProjects" at that stage 
are typically to establish stubs for every country of the world 
and for every day in the calendar.  At around 10 or 20 thousand 
articles, the WikiProjects are the years in the calendar and 
taxonomies for all mammals and birds.  At between 50 and 100 
thousand articles, newspapers begin to write comparisons between 
Wikipedia and traditional printed encyclopedias in the same 
language.

Somewhere along the road, adhering to NPOV and phasing out stubs 
becomes more of a concern.  But it would probably miss the target 
to make a big fuzz about the Urdu Wikipedia's viewpoint on Israel 
(or other controversial topics) at this early stage.  And I think 
the same goes for this fuzz about the sitenotice.  You don't need 
to call the fire brigade to put out a single candle.  And this 
time, the house is not really on fire.

If you speak Urdu (which I don't), by all means, help to improve 
the articles, and help to write more stubs.  After 10,000 articles 
are created, start a WikiProject to identify and weed out stubs.
But just like a gardener, you cannot start weeding before the crop 
has started to grow.

The Swedish Wikipedia was initially very enthusiastic about the 
chance to copy articles from an old out-of-copyright encyclopedia 
(very similar to the 1911 Britannica). It took quite some time 
before the problems became apparent: Negroes were described as an 
inferior race, almost like animals, and old Swedish kings were 
attributed god-like virtues.  You can't really write that today.  
Fortunately, this sorted itself out long before the newspapers 
started to compare the Swedish Wikipedia to contemporary printed 
encyclopedias.

-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se