On 2014-06-24 04:52, Tanweer Morshed wrote:
That's a great news that the Vietnamese Wikipedia has crossed 1M articles.
What are the significant reasons behind Vietnamese Wikipedia's such growth?
Is it just the usage of such clever Bots (that you have mentioned) or
contribution by the Vietnamese Wikipedians? And actually how does the
Cheer!-bot generate articles? Does it translate articles from English (or
other) Wikipedia? And apart from translating, can it set and maintain
correctly other aspects of Wikisyntax and coding?
A great many of the Vietnamese Wikipedia's recent articles have been
created automatically using bots, manually with word processors and mail
merge, or semi-automatically with machine translators like (presumably)
Google Translator Toolkit. Nonetheless, Cheers!-bot held a moratorium on
new articles around the million-article mark, so that day was all about
writing articles the old fashioned way.
Predictably, our bot articles are more infobox than prose. On the other
hand, they do have correct grammar and wiki syntax, which cannot be said
for most machine-translated articles, comprehensive as they may be.
Cheers! is one of our most experienced editors and has done an admirable
job correcting errors, whereas some machine translator users have
uploaded incomprehensible articles anonymously, giving us no opportunity
to engage and educate.
I can't say for certain how Cheers!-bot generates species stubs, but its
earlier U.S. geographic stubs were "translated" from the Spanish
Wikipedia's own bot-created stubs. I'm in the process of cleaning them
up, translating the occasional Spanish place name to Vietnamese. We're
also integrating our [[vi:Template:Infobox settlement]] with Wikidata,
to provide more current information with minimal maintenance. For
example, see the infobox at [[vi:Loveland, Ohio]], which passes only
three parameters but provides 18 rows of information.
The surge in bot-created stubs has alarmed some members of the
Vietnamese Wikipedia community. One frequent theme in our village pump
is that our "depth" at [[m:List of Wikipedias]] has fallen from over a
hundred (one of the highest) to just 15 (one of the lowest) in a few
years. Even taking the depth metric with a grain of salt, I think this
observation has led us to a newfound appreciation for edits,
non-articles, and maybe even authentic, hand-made articles.
More importantly, the million-article milestone has shed a light on our
seemingly low number of active editors. Some have expressed concern that
the steadily rising article count has disincentivized readers from
creating own articles on their own. So we're discussing some changes to
our main page and messages to better engage potential contributors.
We've also integrated tightly with VisualEditor -- the sandbox, "no such
article" message, and "no search results" message all send users to
VisualEditor by default -- hopefully lowering barriers to entry.
None of the Vietnamese Wikipedia's bot operators are interested in
inflating our article count for the sake of. We care deeply about the
future of our wiki and the health of its community, and we welcome
feedback from the community at large.
--
Minh Nguyen
Administrator [[vi:User:Mxn]] [[m:User:Mxn]]
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