Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2017-09-06/News and notes

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Odd to see the Cebuano wikipedia crossing the 5 million article mark, seeing as it has 20 million speakers and only 178 editors. Looks like they have a bot ([1]) churning out articles on cities and plants and animals; does anyone know why they seem to be the only wiki that is doing so? --PresN 15:25, 6 September 2017 (UTC)Reply

Some of the articles need a bit more work. StAnselm (talk) 21:28, 6 September 2017 (UTC)Reply
Other wikis aren't doing so because it's a terrible idea. All Ceb Wiki is doing is turning a bunch of low-quality uncurated databases into massive numbers of Wikipedia stubs that will never be maintained (and many of which contain bogus information). 99% of the articles on Ceb Wiki should be nuked. Kaldari (talk) 23:25, 7 September 2017 (UTC)Reply
Agreed. And whoever maintains www.wikipedia.org apparently agrees, since even though it is second in terms of number of articles, it isn't one of the ten circling the globe, in fact there are two languages Chinese and Portuguese that have less than a million articles are in the grouping. (Waray is treated the same way, the globe has 10 of the top 12 wikipedias by articles, but Waray and Cebuano have less than active 200 users, with the smallest number of other users among the top 12 being Vietnamese with 1800-ish. Naraht (talk) 18:51, 8 September 2017 (UTC)Reply
This speaks to the damage the WMF has caused by making the number of articles the unit of analysis. It is not progress to simply have more articles. Chris Troutman (talk) 00:07, 9 September 2017 (UTC)Reply
Naraht, the portals sort projects by usage rather than article count, since 2008: see m:Project portals. (Portals are run by the community and according to community standards, although right now they're hostage of a sub-standard WMF process.) --Nemo 06:09, 13 September 2017 (UTC)Reply