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Episode 7
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T: This is wikipedia weekly, episode 7, for the week of November 27th, 2006.
F: Welcome to another episode of wikipedia weekly. I'm your host, Andrew Lih, also known as User:Fuzheado on the English Wikipedia. Well last week we got hooked onto the big panel using Skype, so this week we're going for even more with eight folks from around the world. So from Vancouver, canada, we have user:Tawker,
T: Hi there.
F: From the Wikimedia Foundation homeland in florida we've got Danny, aka danny wool.
DW: Hi.
F: And from New Jersey we've got user:Messedrocker.
M: Good morning, afternoon, evening and night.
F: And from the state of Illinois we've got Kelly Martin.
K: Hello out there.
F: And from Wisconsin we've got user 1ne, or Sushigeek.
S: Hello.
F: And this week we're happy to welcome back our Australian, Daveydweeb.
So this week we had three interesting milestones across the Wikipedias. On Wikipedia English we reached 1.5 million articles, at roughly the same time we had German, which reached 500,000 articles, and French which had 400,000 articles. MessedRocker, you know what the 1.5 millionth article is, don't you?
M: Yes, the 1.5 millionth article is the Kanab Ambersnail. The article is about a type of endangered snail which lives in thee grand canyon, and it's a pretty good article so far. It's a few paragraphs, there's a nice reference section going in, some really vivid photographs. All in all it's a pretty good article so far. I' have a feeling that because of its popularity as being the one-point-five millionth article, it's going to get a lot more attention than normal. This could also be relevant to WikiSpecies, which is an attempt on making a directory of all the types of species of life in the world as we know it.
1: I have a question. Did Jordanhill railway station, the one millionth article, did it get attention for being millionth article?
M: Well yeah, it's received a lot of attention. In fact, if you go to the article, it's pretty comprehensive for an article about a railway station, and I believe it's because it's gotten so much attention for being article one million.
K: I believe they even put a plaque up at the railway station, acknowledging its status as the one millionth article, although that may only have been proposed.
1: Maybe the snail article could revive interest in WikiSpecies, because... as of a few months ago, Wikispecies didn't really have activity. So, maybe it could revive it, I don't know.
D: Well it has been receiving a lot of attention, this article. Int he last three days its had 112 edits made to it, unfortunately half of those were vandalism. And the other half were vandalism reverts.
T: And then the whole possibility of protection, and needless to say it's-
F: Oh, it's semi-protected now?
T: Yeah, I protected it and then I got about five complaints about how we shouldn't protect anything linked from the main page, even if it's a vandalmagnet.
F: Well, we'll talk later about protection and how much protection there should be. But it was interesting, in another thing related to Wikipedia articles making it to the real world: when the article about Belgrade in Serbia made it to featured article, and supposedly the mayor of Belgrade mentioned this in his press conference, that Wikipedia selected Belgrade as a featured article. It's interesting how Wikipedia articles being selected for something or making a milestones has suddenly become this big thing to boast about in the real world.
T: Apparently the one thing, I think it was Danny brought up, was that Wikipedia's article on podcasting was actually using in the United States Patent and Trademark office rejection of the word "Podcast" as a trademark.
F: Really?
T: Yeah, it was actually attached -- Wikpedia's entire article was attached to the document, they got a printout of Wikipedia's article.
DW: One of the things that's interesting about this article is that molluscs and snails are something we're pretty weak in at Wikipedia. Looking at the gastropod article, it said there's sixty thousand to seventy thousand known living species of gastropods, but we only categorised one hundred and forty-six. So hopefully this article can get us moving to write about all these other species, which really deserve mention in an encyclopedia.
F: So what do you folks think? I know that Jimbo was emphasising quality over quantity.
K: We definitely have a problem with people adding a lot of content that we really, probably don't need. And in this case it's just pointless trivia, but we also talked a little while ago about the search engine optimisers who are adding content that not only do we not need, but is being added for purposes that aren't really in the encyclopedia's interests in any way.
F: Yeah. Kelly, there's an old Chinese saying that predates even Wikipedia and the internet-
D: Wow. That's old.
F: -that says, "Don't add legs when painting a snake." And I think that is something that is so apt for Wikipedia, that we've got a lot of... I wouldn't call them finished drawings, but we've got a lot of snakes, and we don't need to add all these crazy little trivia things to ruin the article, right? So I think that's a bit challenge of Wikipedia, that you really do have to change your policies as we start to reach different levels of maturity.
D: That's going to be especially difficult, because as you start to work on pruning articles to make sure that we only have what we need, you risk crossing the line to becoming really hardcore deletionist, which is potentially a problem -- especially when new users and anonymous users add content to Wikipedia which is immediately removed. So it introduces the whole extra problem of, at what point do you become excessively deletionist?
K: One of the things is that we have another problem with recognising when an article is mature, and it's when an article covers most of the facts that need to be represented about the topic. It really comes up in biographies -- it comes up in other topics too -- but especially biographies of persons who are no longer living. I mean living persons have all sorts of biographical issues, not the least of which is the fact that they're still alive and therefore things about them changes, but things change about dead people as new facts are discovered. It's a slower process.
But when articles mature and most of what needs to be said has been said, what often ends up happening over time is, people who go to the article and feel "I should change something" and they get this urge to do something and they add some trivia because everything else has been talked about, so they stick in the trivia. And we've seen articles, and I think this happens to JFK, where most of the article wasn't changing but there was this slow accretion over time of undifferentiated facts, no organisation to them and it read like people were just throwing.. like they had darts with data on them, and they were just throwing them at the article and seeing where they stick.
Transcription ends: 07:37