German Wikipedia Passes One Million Article Mark 106
saibot834 writes "The German Wikipedia, the second largest language edition behind the English Wikipedia, just reached its 1,000,000 article milestone. Combined with 3.1M English articles and 240 other language editions, this adds up to a total of 14 million Wikipedia articles. Interestingly, there is a request for deletion on the millionth article. German Wikipedia has been criticized for its rules on notability, which are stricter than on the English Wikipedia. Quality though, is often considered to be higher on the German Wikipedia."
the English one is bad enough (Score:5, Insightful)
When I go to Wikipedia, I'm going there because I want some info that **I** happen to care about. I don't give a flying fuck if it meets some notability guideline. Wikipedia isn't printed on physical paper and sold as a 220-pound (100-kg) pile of books. Bits are cheap to store; there is no reason to be destroying people's hard work other than some asshole power trip. I'm pissed when I go to an article page seeing info and find it deleted; this happens often if you go directly to the obvious article name instead of just relying on Google and not questioning why there isn't an article for you to read.
BTW, the other big problem we have is positive spin. Articles about any given subject are guarded by editors who have a vested interest in the subject. You're lucky if they only do 1-sided enforcement of no-original-research and citation-please rules to abuse people who tone down the glorification. It's easy to see and quite frustrating for the subjects where I am an expert and could be an editor. On the subjects where I am only a reader seeing to understand, it's frightening to know that these special-interest editors are warping my learning.
You could pretty much say that the not-notable, no-original-research, and citation-needed excuses are Wikipedia's way to do a (Score:-1, Unpolitical) moderation. Not that people wouldn't delete stuff that makes them uncomfortable anyway, but those excuses sure encourage them by providing righteous justification.
Request for deletion (Score:3, Insightful)
And by interestingly, you mean unsurprisingly.
no, I want that (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, some rules are still needed to avoid wikipedia being filled with extremely detailed articles written by über-nerds and containing complete commentary on every 5minute slice of every Star-Trek episode.
The chances are pretty slim that I'd ever want Star-Trek trivia, but it's not hurting anybody. That slim chance isn't zero. In case I ever do happen to need such info, where else could I rely on finding it?
Furthermore, somebody clearly thought it was important. If one person thought this, then the chances are pretty decent that at least a few other people would agree.
I am thus deprived of a just barely better wikipedia when you go delete the less important stuff. If I only wanted the important stuff, I could just buy a dead-tree encyclopedia. The unimportant stuff is actually important when you consider the whole.
You're also needlessly pissing off contributers. Maybe that Star-Trek weirdo could also improve an article on something I care more about, but he decides that Wikipedia isn't worth his time because people needlessly destroy the stuff that he most likes to write about. So I miss out on his contributions even if I never would have noticed the Star-Trek stuff.
Re:the English one is bad enough (Score:4, Insightful)
The "citation needed" rule has also been applied far too pervasively. Citations *are* needed, but a typical article should have ten or twenty of them, not fifty or a hundred, and there is absolutely no reason to have citations on basic information that anyone educated in the relevant field would be expected to know. When the article says "rap is a style of music that arose in the second half of the twentieth century", there is no need for a citation on that.
However, I feel the opposite way about the original research rule. That one needs to be enforced more consistently. There are entire articles that are nothing more than the random musings of a couple of editors, with no meaningful citations at all. Occasionally such articles have even been featured on the front page (e.g., the Terraforming of Mars article). Such articles ought to be deleted so that a proper article on the topic can be created without bumping into namespace collisions.
"Better quality" is a cheat! (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, the German Wikipedia has a better quality on average, but that comes to no surprise, given that every not perfect arcticle and all articles about things the admins haven't heard of (video games, minor Star Wars characters etc.) are deleted almost instantly.
And I guess that the English Wikipedia has as much, if not more, high quality articles than the German Wikipedia. The fact that the English Wikipedia allows medium quality articles to stay should not be considered a bad thing, I mean, who cares about the average quality? A medium quality article is still better than none at all (IMHO).
I'm German, but I usually check the English Wikipedia first because I got tired of the procedure "Check German Wikipedia -> Be disappointed to find that the article has been deleted -> Read the English article instead"
(Because of the "delete everything you don't find interesting" policy, some people have created "Wikibay", the encyclopedia where everything is considered relevant, as long as it's sourced etc. click here for German Wikibay [wikibay.org])