Mailing List Archive

Brion VIBBER wrote:
> From English wiki:
> sv 358 Swedish (??? of 212) This is odd.
> From German wiki:
> sv 351 Swedish (??? of 212) This is odd.

212 is the article (comma) count. There are 394 pages in the Swedish
Wikipedia.

Also, you assume that interwiki links must point to articles that
already exist. Normal (intrawiki) links can point to pages that don't
yet exist, and there is no harm in that.

Further, it is odd that the Swedish Wikipedia has only attracted
contributions of 212 articles. Maybe the management is doing
something wrong in promoting that website. That theory could also
explain why the Spanish Wikipedia only has 2000 articles, while
another famous Wiki in the Spanish language has well over 9000
articles. Perhaps the Spanish interwiki links would be more useful if
they pointed to where the contributions go. Just an idea.


--
Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik
Teknikringen 1e, SE-583 30 Linuxköping, Sweden
tel +46-70-7891609
http://aronsson.se/ http://elektrosmog.nu/ http://susning.nu/

Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> That would be very interesting ...

They're not stored in the link tables, but I can rig up queries on the
text on the order of:
SELECT count(*) from cur where cur_text like "%[[la:%";

There may be a few false positives.

From English wiki:
de 1322 German (30% of 4466)*
eo 998 Esperanto (28% of 3512)
fr 713 French (34% of 2112)
pl 664 Polish (16% of 4140)
nl 545 Dutch (38% of 1422)
es 443 Spanish (21% of 2069)
sv 358 Swedish (??? of 212) This is odd.
no 351 Norwegian (93% of 377)
pt 35 Portuguese (10% of 334)
it 22 Italian (17% of 128)
sl 21 Slovene (24% of 88)
dk 17 Danish (15% of 113)
ca 7 Catalan ( 5% of 135)
ja 5 Japanese (100% of 5)
af 4 Afrikaans (12% of 34)
la 4 Latin (29% of 14)
et 2 Estonian (29% of 7)
sh 2 Serbo-Croatian ( 2% of 110)
ia 1 Interlingua (25% of 4)


From German wiki:
en 1376 English ( 3% of 40821)*
eo 730 Esperanto (21% of 3512)
pl 531 Polish (13% of 4140)
fr 521 French (25% of 2112)
nl 477 Dutch (36% of 1422)
es 409 Spanish (20% of 2069)
sv 351 Swedish (??? of 212) This is odd.
no 346 Norwegian (92% of 377)
pt 23 Portuguese ( 7% of 334)
it 13 Italian (10% of 128)
sl 9 Slovene (10% of 88)
dk 9 Danish ( 8% of 113)
ca 5 Catalan ( 4% of 135)
la 4 Latin (29% of 14)
af 3 Afrikaans ( 9% of 34)
ja 2 Japanese (40% of 5)
et 2 Estonian (29% of 7)
sh 2 Serbo-Croatian ( 2% of 110)
ia 1 Interlingua (25% of 4)

* German and English article counts come from Special:Statistics; all
others are comma pages.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Lars Aronsson wrote:
> Brion VIBBER wrote:
>> From English wiki:
>>sv 358 Swedish (??? of 212) This is odd.
>
> 212 is the article (comma) count. There are 394 pages in the Swedish
> Wikipedia.

Which means many of the linked articles either don't exist or are
comma-less stubs.

> Also, you assume that interwiki links must point to articles that
> already exist. Normal (intrawiki) links can point to pages that don't
> yet exist, and there is no harm in that.

I'm not "assuming" that; that's an empirical observation of most (all?)
of the interlanguage links except for the ones you yourself have put in
without warning to nonexistent articles.

Whether they _ought_ to be that way is another matter. My contention, at
least as things stand now, is that the interlanguage links are more like
streamlined links to external websites than they are like internal wiki
links. You wouldn't link to an external web site that _might_ come into
being in the future but doesn't exist yet, especially without giving
warning. Would you?

> Further, it is odd that the Swedish Wikipedia has only attracted
> contributions of 212 articles. Maybe the management is doing
> something wrong in promoting that website.

Maybe they just don't draw as much activity when there's already an
active encyclopedia-like Swedish wiki at susning.nu? You may have heard
of it. :)

> That theory could also
> explain why the Spanish Wikipedia only has 2000 articles, while
> another famous Wiki in the Spanish language has well over 9000
> articles. Perhaps the Spanish interwiki links would be more useful if
> they pointed to where the contributions go. Just an idea.

I've suggested that myself; support has been lukewarm here and nobody
seems to have bothered to ask the Spanish wikiistas what they prefer.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Brion VIBBER wrote:
> I'm not "assuming" that; that's an empirical observation of most (all?)
> of the interlanguage links except for the ones you yourself have put in
> without warning to nonexistent articles.
>
> Whether they _ought_ to be that way is another matter. My contention, at
> least as things stand now, is that the interlanguage links are more like
> streamlined links to external websites than they are like internal wiki
> links. You wouldn't link to an external web site that _might_ come into
> being in the future but doesn't exist yet, especially without giving
> warning. Would you?

The difference is that they *are* pointing to wiki pages that happen
to be blank, but where anybody can add contents at the click of a
link. I consider it a bug that the links are not displayed as
?-links. I guess this can be fixed in the PHP source code. Editing
an English page to add the correct translation of the title should be
considered a useful contribution.

> Maybe they just don't draw as much activity when there's already an
> active encyclopedia-like Swedish wiki at susning.nu? You may have heard
> of it. :)

I promised Larry Sanger not to use these lists to promote my own
website. If you dig through the archives, you should note that I have
been extremely careful to avoid that. However, I never promised not
to promote Enciclopedia Libre in Sevilla. Outside of these forums, I
do what I can to promote my site, and with good results. If anybody
wants the Swedish Wikipedia to attract contributions, I think they
should start to promote the website, and I wish them good luck. It
would help if it ran the new phase III software.


--
Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik
Teknikringen 1e, SE-583 30 Linuxköping, Sweden
tel +46-70-7891609
http://aronsson.se/ http://elektrosmog.nu/ http://susning.nu/

On Wed, Sep 04, 2002 at 02:24:41AM +0200, Lars Aronsson wrote:
> The difference is that they *are* pointing to wiki pages that happen
> to be blank, but where anybody can add contents at the click of a
> link. I consider it a bug that the links are not displayed as
> ?-links. I guess this can be fixed in the PHP source code. Editing
> an English page to add the correct translation of the title should be
> considered a useful contribution.

1.
Databases are independent and (with exception of images) it would be
better if they stayed so (they don't even use the same software).

2.
If not optimized, it might be pretty heavy performance hit.

3.
Structure of Wikipedias is not the same. You can't really know the
structure for sure before articles are there. So these links may end
pointing to blank pages while real content already exists under some
other title. Even in seemingly trivial cases like titles that happen
to be proper names, different middle names, diactrics and
disambiguation policy may lead to many misses.