Gebanibespik:Smeira

Bespikapad gebana: Smeira.

Big Vükiped?

Stop doing cadastral changes on this wikipedia! Yours wikipedia is now as a symbol of bad condition of wikipedia. Maybe you think it will look cool when Volapiuk wikipedia be at top 15 or top 10 of all wikipedias, but depth of yours wikipedia would never be 1, even after 5 years. I am not twaddle here, I just want that you think a little about Your wikipedia's condition. Thanks. --Battousai 11:33, 2 setul 2007 (UTC)

Dear Battousai,

I understand your concern. But I have what I believe to be good reasons for doing this. If you want to know, I'll explain why. Maybe I'll go to your English wikipedia page and leave you a little message, since you're worried about this. --Smeira 11:45, 2 setul 2007 (UTC)

Sorry for maybe angry previous letter. But don't forget improving quality of this wikipedia, not entirely quantity ;) Good luck. --Battousai 18:44, 2 setul 2007 (UTC)

And could you write about en:Lithuanian language? I think it's very important article for such a big wikipedia as Volapiuk. --Battousai 19:14, 2 setul 2007 (UTC)

I'll try. I like your Lietuviu kalba ;-) (Another guy had asked me to do an article on the Armenian language. If only I had more people writing Volapük articles!...) --Smeira 19:39, 2 setul 2007 (UTC)

Could you please explain your "good reasons" for doing this? As the founder of the Esperanto Wikipedia, we have worked hard for 6 years now to build a good-quality encyclopedia and everything we do is in Esperanto, including discussions, but looking at your page here, I see that almost none of the discussion here is in Volapuk. Could you please explain why you are pimping your quantity at the great expense of quality?? --Chuck_SMITH

Como es que puedes permitir cambio tan drásticos como estos en esta Wikipedia. Lo que se ha hecho aquí parece por lo menos a primera vista una malintenciada necesidad que crear más y más artículos. Toda wikipedia debe crecer progresivamente en la medida de lo posible, y se que esto no escapa de tus manos, si deseas puedes detener esta creación indiscriminada de artículos y empezar poco a poco a construir una verdadera wikipipedia. He estado buscando artículos bien estructurados y su cantidad es ínfima comparada con los stubs que existen aquí, y Por favor, le debes una explicación ha muchas personas que se ven ofendidas al encontrar esta wikipedia con un contenido casi nulo; y considero que sería adecuado que la escribieras aquí en tu página de discusión. Soy Kanon6917 de la wikipedia en español, inglés y quechua. Por favor, ten en cuenta el comentario, expresa el sentir de muchos respecto a la Vükiped.

Answers?

I tried to answer individually, on each person's main user page, to the important questions and criticism mentioned above. I'm placing here also a generic answer in English, since there may be other interested people. --Smeira 00:15, 6 setul 2007 (UTC)

Dear XXX,

You asked me why the size of the Volapük wikipedia is increasing so fast. In fact, I've been doing this by transferring information over placenames from other wikipedias. You say this is bad because the actual depth/quality of the Volapük wikipedia is not good; it goes completely against the basic idea of a wikipedia to have 95% of your articles be short descriptions of places, etc. I agree entirely: the quality of the Volapük wikipedia is much inferior to, say, that of the Lithuanian wikipedia (to say nothing of the English wikipedia). In fact, if you wanted to use the Volapük wikipedia as an example of a "bad wikipedia", or something a "good wikipedia" shouldn't do, I will even agree.

So why am I doing this? Basically...

• The Volapük wikipedia can never be a big wikipedia; or even a really good wikipedia. There are only about 20-25 other Volapükists in the world; half of them are beginners and can only read or write basic stuff; most of the few people who are good enough to write articles are not really interested in computers, the internet, or wikipedia. I've sent e-mails to people and to the Volapük Yahoo group, I've sent letters to the little Volapük newsletter asking for cooperation; nothing happened. The result is that the Volapük wikipedia is pretty much a one-person project, with me being responsible for it. I had at first a colleague, Manie, also a sysop (he was, by the way, the one who started entering small city stubs), but after a while it seems he got more interested in the Afrikaans wikipedia (Afrikaans is his native language). So I stayed alone; and one person cannot build a good wikipedia ("single-person bias", i.e. I'm interested in certain things that I can write about, but not everything, and the things I don't know won't be well represented, etc.). I wrote (actually translated) a number of good articles (look up matemat = mathematics, or filosop = philosophy, or fösilav = paleontology; I also like biographies: Milan Kundera, or Anaïs Nin; and also Volapükists of the past: Arie de Jong, or Auguste Kerckhoffs). But I realized very soon that I would never write enough to make a difference. I'm only one person; and as long as I'm the only one, the Volapük wikipedia would never go beyond a couple of hundred pages, mostly about things I like.
• Then I thought: what can I do about this? Since the letters and pleas to other Volapükists didn't work, I thought I could try to get some new people interested in learning the language and contributing by doing something a little crazy -- like increasing the size of the Volapük wikipedia as fast as I could, with Python programs for copying and pasting information onto pre-translated templates. In many wikipedias this had already been done (I actually got the idea from the US city articles in the English Wikipedia). Maybe this will work. At least, some two or three new people have contacted me, and may be interested enough to learn Volapük and start writing articles. My hope? Simply that more and more people will hear about this language, and among some of them there will be people interested in working and improving the Volapük wikipedia. Perhaps newbies who will want to learn it in order to contribute, or even people who learned it independently but didn't know there was a Vükiped. (Ask yourselves: how many among you -- the Esperantists excepted -- knew anything about Volapük, or even that it existed at all, before the Volapük Vükiped started growing fast?). Is this a bad idea? Well, I'm open for suggestions, in case you have a better one.

• But isn't this bad for Wikipedia as a whole? The Volapük wikipedia isn't good; other people might say: see? That shows Wikipedia is bad. Just a bunch of guys putting stupid little articles there, which nobody is interested in. But, if you think about it...
  • Any person likely to argue like this would already have sufficient material for that. S/he could ask: why are there so many little wikipedias -- some in dead languages like Anglo-Saxon (Old English) or Ancient Greek -- when they'll never have a wide readership? There are only a few specialists who can actually write good articles in these languages, and who except the same specialists will read them? In fact, if you think about it, the smallest wikipedias -- say, the last 50 in the List of Wikipedias at Meta -- are for languages that are very small and probably will never have enough knowledgeable contributors to become really good, to have more than a few hundred non-stub articles. So why? (Note that this is most clearly not my opinion; I'm just making the point that Wiki-skeptics already could make this -- in my opinion not hard to defeat -- argument even without the Volapük Wikipedia; I've already heard things that sounded like that).
  • Even the best wikipedias also did lots of "automatic adding" of little stubs. I'd say more than 100,000 articles in the English wikipedia were written that way (look up the history of articles on smaller US cities and towns, from which I originally got the idea). Other wikipedias -- French, German, especially also Polish -- have also copied a lot of them automatically. You could say I'm doing the same for the Volapük wikipedia now -- in the hope that better days will come, with more contributors, that will lead to a more interesting Wikipedia.

(What happens if this never happens? What will I do after, say, a year or two, if nobody ever shows any real interest in contributing? Well, I'm a human being. I guess if nobody ever comes, I'll eventually become discouraged and quit. Maybe I'll just keep a copy of the Vükiped on my laptop for emotional reasons, and let go of the idea. Maybe I'll shed a few tears and write a book about this poor language, which had such a beautiful promising start and such a sad fate. But right now, I'm hopeful and energetic...)

• • Does the Volapük Wikipedia "lie" to its potential readers? No -- the "quality" issue (i.e. most articles are obviously little descriptive city stubs) is in my opinion quite obvious, and even if it weren't, the text in the main page (actually in the Komotanefaleyan -- the community portal --) says so (for the 20-25 extant Volapük speakers...) and asks for help. Non-Volapük speakers could come here and read this text... but frankly, what difference does it make to them? They will either be working on (or using or consulting) the Wikipedia(s) of their own favorite language(s), not worried about one they can't even read. How many non-Cherokee speakers care about current editing problems in the Cherokee wikipedia? How many non-Quechua speakers care about the number of biology articles in the Quechua wikipedia? Or in the Guarani Wikipedia? These are problems for the communities involved with developing and improving these wikipedias, and for their potential readers.

So: some of you are "offended" or "angry" at the size of the Volapük wikipedia. But why? Your own favorite wikipedias are certainly developing well, and their development in no way depends on the Volapük Vükiped. Your wikipedias are certainly more inclusive, better organized, and better thought out than the Volapük wikipedia; why should the size of the latter offend you? Only if one thinks that article number is the only way to measure how good a wikipedia is -- which is of course not true, as any of a number of texts on Wikipedia statistics in the various Wikipedias and elsewhere on the web will quickly demonstrate (better indicators are e.g. average number of edits per article, or of editors per article). Your work on your own favorite Wikipedias is clearly of good quality; the results are beautiful and impressive. Please go on; your work and your results don't depend on the state or size of the Volapük Wikipedia. If you want, as I said at the beginning, you can even use the Vükiped as an example of what you don't want to do and why. It's usually good to have such an example to make the point.

I'm currently making little articles based on French cities (actually "communes"), of which the French wikipedia has about 30,000. My idea is to get to about 100,000 - 110,000 articles and then stop. I could perhaps continue, but with diminishing results. I will simply stop, work on cleaning up the city articles, on more articles (stars and astronomy, or dinosaurs and paleontology, or philosophy, or literature and other stuff I like), and at the same time wait and see if other people show up. Maybe, some people who will see this deceivingly large Vükiped and will come and look around will become interested, and perhaps want to help make it more like the others. That would make this 'disorganized growth' worthwhile.

That's it. These are my reasons. In sum, I don't think I'm doing anything wrong. If you disagree, feel free to let me know. I'd love to hear your comments and arguments.

--Smeira 00:15, 6 setul 2007 (UTC)

Hi Smeira!

Danob oli, Smeira! In no Vükiped votik pebenokömob so flenöfo. Löfob püki obsa, so vilob keblünön fredo. Gebidob liedo te vödabuki smalik e glamat oba binon nog mükik, so okosamob oli suviko... -- HannesM 04:41, 4 setul 2007 (UTC)

Danö pro komands ola! Ägebob kösömo eli Lehrbuch pro deutänapükans. Jenöfo binob sperantapükan, ab sperantapük kontenükon obi no fovo. Denu lärnob Volapüki e gebob ati ad lautön. Velövob keblünön in literat, pükav e stelav. Ab dabinons-li vöds volapükik pro vöds nolavik as sam "classicismus" ü "amplitudo"? -- HannesM 14:29, 5 setul 2007 (UTC)