Reports/November 2004/Wikipedia
- (Insert your Wikipedia if you want to report about it.)
The Arabic Wikipedia currently contains 1480 articles (around 200 new articles during the month of November); these articles have been edited 20699 times. Currently, there are 6 administrators and 1 candidate to be an administrator. There are 872 users (a relatively small percentage of them appears to be active). There doesn't seem to be any special ongoing projects, but a lot of improvement to the existing articles seems to be going on.
The French Wikipedia continues its steady growth, having reached 65 000 articles by the end of November. Efforts towards promotion in the media finally paid off, with a front page article in one of the major French national newspapers, Libération and a radio interview of Anthere on a high profile news radio station, BFM. It is interesting to note also that an educational Canadian (Québec) website, www.infobourg.com, who had previously written about Wikipedia published a comparison of Wikipédia, Universalis, Encarta, Quid, Hachette and WebEncyclo, in which Wikipédia has nothing to envy to other encyclopedia.
Vincent Ramos, whose contributions in the linguistics section in the French Wikipedia have been unvaluable has been appointed sysop with an overwhelming support from the community.
The creation of an arbitration committee is still underway, but the general principle has been approved and policies are being refined.
notafish }<';> 04:53, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC) (French translation to come here)
The Gujarati Wikipedia has little activity in November. About 23 pages. Yann 09:32, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)
The Hindi Wikipedia has little activity in November. About 350 articles. Yann 09:32, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Hungarian Wikipédia is alive and kicking. We have approximately 25 active permanent editors (38 with more than 5, 9 with more than 100 edits) and reaching 4000 articles by December. Mind you, these aren't robot generated articles (as some other languages may proudly announce thousands of "articles") but most of them above stub material: Wikipedia stats show 75% of the articles are above 512 bytes and 22% is larger than 2KB. We keep our house tidy (as far as I know there are no copyright infringing pictures and articles in our db) and we're a bit maybe too deletionists due to the general habit of expecting qualityless articles not to appear (meaning one-liners are rather getting deleted than not). Permanent editors are from various fields of professions and generate a fair amount of quality material; some of which got translated back to other Wikipedias.
We have a low but persistent amount of good anonymous contributors.
We have so far a pretty low idiot and spam flow. We experienced only one edit war, which happened recently, and basically mirrored in German and English Wikipedia, done by the same person, who seems to be learning Wikipedia habits (and hopefully manners too in the future).
We have only one sysop (yours truly), which may or may not be good. (I guess this is a thing which should be changed, but we're a low amount of deletes and one protected page in article space, so sysop actions are fairly rare.) This one was so far unchallanged for fairness and tries to push every disagreed matters to public vote. :)
Most of our policies and structures (categories, other namespaces) follow en.wikipedia, some policies are laxed and some strictened (for example we not welcome US "fair use" pictures which are most often than not violate EU copyright policies; we're maybe a bit more strict labeling articles "stub" than we should be), but generally debated questions get voted on and decided based on votes, so life seems to be fine around. :-) (Apart from those who think that your humble reporter is a dictator, but my bodyguards are already controlling the situation.)
Over'n'out. --grin 18:09, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)
The Icelandic Wikipedia saw some growth in early November as 2-3 new users appeared and made several new quality articles about Icelandic geography. Those users unfortunately have remained inactive since then, that leaves the same 4-6 active contributors as before, getting new people to join is the top priority of the Icelandic Wikipedia now.
On November 7 we had our first encounter with mass vandalism, the IP was banned and the damage undone swiftly.
On November 15, a new layout was introduced to the Main page (see the old one and the new).
Although the Icelandic Wikipedia crossed the 1000 article milestone on the counters in last August it must be kept in mind that the number of actual articles is much lower and is yet to reach 1000. At present time there are almost 1700 "articles" on is.wikipedia but over 700 of those are day, year and decade pages, most of them are still only skeletons without any actual information. Of the remaining 1000 pages, 405 are categorized as stubs.
--Biekko 17:17, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Lithuanian Wikipedia is doing fine, I hope we will reach 1500 articles at the end of this year. We have two active and one rather inactive administrator and about 5 active contributing members. Best covered areas are geography, history, politics, mathematics and biology. We have a very productive and skilled contributor lt:User:Algirdas for biology related articles, which in many cases I think are better than the english ones. However number of actively contributing members remains low, therefore many areas are covered very sketchy or not covered at all. Due to the lack of understanding in legal matters most of the pictures are not identified by their copyright status, however we have not identified clear copyright breaches yet.Dirgela2 09:34, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Some activity on the Marathi Wikipedia. Now 581 articles and 31 contributors. Yann 09:58, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Some activity on the Nepalese Wikipedia. Now 19 articles and 13 users. Yann 09:58, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)
The Romanian Wikipedia has done excellently in November, growing more than 1,400 articles and set to reach 10,000 by the end of the month. Additionally, there has been a consolidation in better content and a moderate influx of new users after an article in a local city newspaper. Upon reaching the 10,000 benchmark, the Romanian Wikipedia will introduce a press release, hoping to attract more new users. It will also unveil its plan for 2005, which predicts very optimistic growth in the first three months. We have now adopted a target-based system for growth. The current targets are:
- By end of December 2004: 12,000 articles
- By end of January 2005: 13,500 articles
- By end of February 2005: 15,000 articles
- By end of July 2005: 20,000 articles
- By end of December 2005: 30,000 articles - our big goal for year-end 2005. Our _very_ ambitious goal is also making it into the top 12 of all Wikipedias by year-end 2005.
Our promotionn campaign for 10.000 has been considerably downsized due to lack of time and support. Therefore, the press release will be the centrepiece of the promotion.
We are also seeking to improve the quality of our articles and launch a promotion campaign. In 2005, our goal will be to improve article breadth - that is, create more and better articles on a greater range of subjects. There are many ways to do this and we haven't yet come up with a certain way. The best way would be to revive the campaign we had in mid-2004 or selecting a topic area and intensively creating articles based on that. Ronline 09:45, 29 Nov 2004 (UTC)
In our second month of operation we have basically doubled all of our vital stats, to 18 registered users and 92 articles. At this stage there remains a mix of smallish articles (no two word sentences!) and more substantial articles. In fact scn:wiki has done every translation of the week since week 2 (when we started) and, indeed, we are hoping to submit our own high quality candidates for assessment. The load is still being carried by three main users, with only another three making any form of contribution to date, but I am confident of having up to 10 regular users within 6 months. With that in place, I see no reason why we shouldn't reach 1,000 articles by this time next year. Our other challenge is to continue translating instructions and guides into Sicilian, and to continue adding the bells and whistles. Thank you for the privilege of being allowed onto Wikipedia, I can promise you that the impact will be bigger than these stats I am showing you above. Salutamu pippu --165.228.128.11 01:49, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)