Disputatio Vicipaediae:1000 paginae

1000 paginae: comparing the wikis

Meta has a useful page of statistics comparing how the wikis handle the 1000 paginae (actually 1001 paginae because of a fluke). The median size of these articles (#501 in the list) is 2821 characters, but the median in Vicipaedia is only 2144. The top five articles in average size (and, some might suggest, those therefore perceived to be the top five in universal importance) are United States (#1), World War II (#2), Adolf Hitler (#3), Germany (#4), and Israel (#5). The rank of the third, fourth, and fifth surprises one, as does the fact that as many as 13 of the top 21 are nation-states. Throughout the list, an overemphasis on European culture and modern times is evident; however, as religions go, Islam (#12) far outranks Christianity (#84). As humans go, after Hitler, Jesus (#20), and Einstein (#22) comes Che Guevara (#25)—a biography that would surely be struck from the 1000-page list by any reputable historian, or at least ranked far below Stalin (#26), Lenin (#94), and Mao (#228). The most important literary figure is William Shakespeare (#46). The most important musical figure is Beethoven (#83). The most important topic of the ancient world is Julius Caesar (#48). The most important nonhuman animal is Cat (#42), which barely beats Bird (#47) but does much better than Dog (#146). Vicipaedia has four articles that, for their topics, are the largest in all of wikiland:

Cultura (#141); and fifteen other wikis exceed 30K

Infinitas (#847); and only :ca: also exceeds 30K

Sexus (#857); and only :ca: & :de: also exceed 30K

Polytheismus (#978); and no other wiki exceeds 30K

The least important articles (in average size)—and therefore, one might suppose, those in dire danger of deletion so that other topics might be added—are Large intestine (#996), Prose (#997), Length (#998), Nut (fruit) (#999), Newton (unit) (#1000), and Integumentary system (#1001).
We should perhaps consult this list when considering which pages to feature as paginae mensis. IacobusAmor 13:59, 7 Augusti 2010 (UTC)

Interesting stats. Infinitas is so large in part because it contains some stuff that should probably more properly belong at wikitexts, but with the awesome celare/monstrare template, it was agreed to keep it in the article. That being said, as I was reading it, it could stand some rewriting and expanding for clarity's sake. Of course this was an FA almost two years ago, so doesn't help now.

Boasting the biggest article on sexus, cultura, and polytheismus, on the other hand, is pretty cool.

Do we know, by chance, how many of the 1001 articles have already been paginae mensis here? Surely we've covered a couple of them.

I'm agreeing, Jacob, that the list is somewhat lopsided. Of course, though, I've always agreed about that. Guess we just have to play into their game if we want the respect =]

--Ioscius ^∞ 07:43, 9 Augusti 2010 (UTC)

This is what I get. 18 of our paginae mensis are on the 1000 pages list (listed with weighted size estimate from Usor:Secundus Zephyrus/1000 paginae sizes):

1. Cultura (148120)
2. Bellum Civile Americanum (108705)
3. Cuba (75097)
4. Infinitas (43540)
5. Physica electromagnetica (36361)
6. Scacchi (30636)
7. Liber (litterae) (22691)
8. Tellus (21962)
9. Caseus (21388) ← Brother Andrew has now boosted this one above 30K. IacobusAmor 13:07, 9 Augusti 2010 (UTC)
10. Mathematica (19538)
11. Caesar (18860)
12. Berolinum (17170)
13. Ecclesia Catholica (16882)
14. Nix (15312)
15. Pulchritudo (12886)
16. Pecunia (12082)
17. Asteroides (10266)
18. Carolus Marx (3034) --Ioscius ^∞ 09:05, 9 Augusti 2010 (UTC)

It's gratifying that only two of them are biographies, because (as I've long observed) biographies are a major locus of the POVness inherent in any list of this sort. Designing my own list, I might abolish the biographies, even that of the (evidently) most important human being in all of history: Adolf Hitler. He already figures in Fascism, Germany, Holocaust, Nazi Germany, World War II, and probably elsewhere. In contrast, neither Cambodia nor Pol Pot makes the list. IacobusAmor 13:07, 9 Augusti 2010 (UTC)

Other metrics

In the official scoring as of 2 August 2010, Vicipaedia ranked 40th among the wikis, with 17.60 points, 90.00 being a perfect score (most nearly reached by the Catalan wiki, with 86.24). Vicipaedia fared much worse on two other metrics. Its mean article had 5154 characters, giving it a rank of 68th, and its median article had 2114 characters, giving it a rank of 83rd. If you want to see Vicipaedia's most typical (median) article, here it is: Tromocratia. To help raise the median, just take an article that's smaller than 2114 characters and add something to it. That will raise the mean too. Here's the list (thanks to Secundus Zephyrus). You've got hundreds of articles to choose from! IacobusAmor 13:27, 11 Augusti 2010 (UTC)

We're down to 43rd as of 4 December 2011, between Malayalam and Estonian, though our point score is up to 20.87. (Perfect score is 100, by the way: 9 points for a 30K article times 1000 articles = 9000, then divided by 90 for scaling.) We're improving on the other metrics, though: our mean of 6416 is 64th and our median of 3440 is 62nd. We are the second-smallest WP that isn't missing any articles (second smallest by score, mean, and median); we're ahead of Occitan. Median page at the moment is Oecologia.

All these metrics are sort of arbitrary, to be sure: not only can we argue about what belongs on the 1000-page list, but the 10,000 and 30,000 character thresholds are arbitrary, the point scores for small, medium, and large articles are arbitrary, and the language weights are only vaguely scientific (based on counting the number of characters in translations of one single passage from the Bible). But since this is a way we're being measured, we may as well try to win the game, no? A. Mahoney 21:19, 4 Decembris 2011 (UTC)

Progressus recentior

Verba addidi etiam in paginam Homerus. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 18:59, 11 Augusti 2010 (UTC)

OK, I'll type it in (above) and change the sum, but you might want to add a few more words, as Secundus Zephyrus's list shows that Homerus had 6880 at the end (?) of 7 August, and you haven't added enough since then to exceed 10K for sure. Also, I'll keep updating our progress above. IacobusAmor 19:14, 11 Augusti 2010 (UTC)

We got numerus above 10k yesterday. That's another easily achieved 30k potential. --Ioscius ^∞ 09:05, 13 Augusti 2010 (UTC)

I've temporarily deleted Leonardus Vincius from Ioscius's list because the latest running of Secundus Zephyrus's program shows that it's 673 characters short. :( IacobusAmor 17:23, 14 Augusti 2010 (UTC)

Well I just gave ole' Leo around 1300. Think it's safe to undelete? --Ioscius ^∞

Woohoo! IacobusAmor 01:48, 15 Augusti 2010 (UTC)

Added a good 4,000 to lingua Anglica, might get another couple thousand before I go to bed.--Ioscius ^∞ 20:00, 15 Augusti 2010 (UTC)

At an estimated 18.40, we're looking good now to pull ahead of Lietuvių (17.70) at the next official Meta calculation, and Bahasa Melayu (18.56) is in reaching distance, unless those folks get busy too. Then we face a sizeable barrier, whose broaching would put us in position to challenge several tightly bunched languages: ไทย (20.31), Galego (20.48), Slovenščina (20.50), and then with similar effort Srpskohrvatski/Српскохрватски (21.50) and Esperanto (21.66). IacobusAmor 12:38, 16 Augusti 2010 (UTC)

I've got a personal vendetta against the Slovene wiki. Let's get 'em =] --Ioscius ^∞ 19:38, 17 Augusti 2010 (UTC)

Heh. The race is on! Note that the Slovenes may be inattentive lately: their score last month actually went down. (As for me, I'm expecting to get Opera above 30K in a few days, going through Opera graf by graf.) IacobusAmor 19:48, 17 Augusti 2010 (UTC)

progressus?

Jacob said something just a minute ago that has me confused...

"But we shouldn't spend much time on him (Andreas Warhol), in comparison with topics that have better reasons to be counted among the 1000 most important topics of all time. (He'll presumably be deleted as the list improves.)"

I'm just a little confused then what to do. As far as I'm concerned a good many things on the list are unimportant. Marlene Dietrich, Sara Bernhardt are both dolls, but 1000 most important of all time? Marilyn Monroe? Others are so close in importance that you wonder for example why Fermi made it, but Bohr and Oppenheimer didn't. Andy Warhol is destined for failure, Mark Twain is worth expanding. I'm just not sure what to do other than work with what's on the list now. How can I tell what the final list will look like? --Ioscius ^∞ 12:10, 12 Augusti 2010 (UTC)

In a perfect world, it would be improved today; but given Wikipedia's modus operandi and the nature of its personnel, don't count on it any time soon. In cultural matters, the list is disproportionately (1) Western and (2) modern. As a prescriptive list, it necessarily has a POV; and because it was constructed by amateurs, its whole structure is questionable. In music (a subject you especially like, no?) after 1828, for example, in addition to Brahms, Dvořák, Puccini, Tchaikovsky, Verdi, & Wagner, it has Chopin in preference to, say, Schumann, and it omits Berlioz & Liszt. Better, je crois, would be to cut all the biographies and cite instead an article on "Western music of the nineteenth century" or something like that. Such an article would necessarily mention all these figures, and would include references (and links) to popular music & religious music [e.g. hymns], and of course, if one wanted to be genuinely Western about it, the operettas of Gilbert & Sullivan‡—topics that don't figure at all in the list. For the twentieth century, the 1000 articles include biographies of Armstrong (!), The Beatles (!), Mahler, Piaf (!), Presley (!), Puccini, Stravinsky, Umm Kulthum (!), and Vysotsky (!), but egregiously omit Bartók & Schoenberg, not to mention Debussy, Shostakovich, and zillions of others whose places in history are a little less settled, like Berg, Britten, Carter, Copland, Ives, Messaien, Prokofiev, Ravel, Strauss, Webern, etc. Again, the best POV-based solution might be to abolish the biographies and go with "Western music of the twentieth century," in which all these musicians—and many more!—would necessarily figure. Or, using compositional landmarks instead of centuries, maybe divide recent history into "Western music from 1828 [death of Schubert] to 1911 [death of Mahler]" and "Western music from 1912 ["It's a Long Way to Tipperary," Memphis Blues, Pierrot Lunaire, Prokofiev's 1st & 2nd piano concertos, "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling"] to the present." IacobusAmor 13:09, 12 Augusti 2010 (UTC)

‡But that would be silly, and instead, perhaps some genre-based article ("Western operas, operettas, and musicals from 1800 to the present") would do, inviting analogous articles on Peking opera, Kabuki, Noh, wayang, etc., etc. IacobusAmor 13:15, 12 Augusti 2010 (UTC)

Let's just write :) Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 12:37, 12 Augusti 2010 (UTC)

Amen. IacobusAmor 13:09, 12 Augusti 2010 (UTC)

Paginam Nederlandia auxi (historia) et partim mutavi--Utilo 13:58, 14 Augusti 2010 (UTC)

Macte, amice! Commentarium auxisti a 15 042 (sine intervicis verbisque celatis = circa 13 500) litteris ad 24 210 (= circa 22 500). Potes eum augere supra circa 32 000 (= circa 30 000)? IacobusAmor 14:04, 14 Augusti 2010 (UTC)

Quod videlicet faciam, sed non continuo.--Utilo 15:36, 14 Augusti 2010 (UTC)

Factum!--Utilo 08:35, 16 Augusti 2010 (UTC)

Nisi fallor, Nederlandia iam plus quam 30 000 habet!--Utilo 21:15, 19 Augusti 2010 (UTC)

Adde Alexander Magnus quem a 10 000 ad 30 000 promovi. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 18:03, 19 Augusti 2010 (UTC)

Vidobonam trans 10 000 auxi.--Utilo 13:26, 28 Augusti 2010 (UTC)

Macte, sed 11 005 octeti infeliciter ut videtur haud sufficiens sunt, quia nobis opus est octetos nexuum interviciorum deducere. Secundum [hunc indicem, Vindobona 7173.1 octetos habuit, et circa 2131 addisti (summa: circa 9304). Potes addere circa 1000 octetos novos? IacobusAmor 13:59, 28 Augusti 2010 (UTC)

Vindobona nunc ultra 30 000 esse debeat.--Utilo 16:05, 31 Augusti 2010 (UTC)

Ecclesia Catholica Romana nunc ultra 30 000 est.--Utilo 21:11, 2 Septembris 2010 (UTC)

We're down to a dozen missing pages, most of them mathematical (something I can actually help with), so I'm trying to get them all in, for tidiness. I've started this morning with the two from physics, vis imbecillis and vis fortis, summarized from the English articles -- please flesh these out, physicists! (in terms of score, a stub isn't worth much more than an absent article, for what that's worth, but there's satisfaction in having all 1000, necne?) -- A. Mahoney 15:23, 11 Maii 2011 (UTC)

I've already done Vacuum. I call dibs on en:Hindi-Urdu (not the same as Lingua Hindi) and en:Delhi. And why do the people at Metawiki think Civitas sui iuris isn't equivalent to en:Sovereign state? Is it just a matter of which English article it's been linked to? If so, the fix is easy. IacobusAmor 15:41, 11 Maii 2011 (UTC)

Oh good, I'd just put in the "lingua Hindi" link but if you want to write something better about them as one language, go right ahead (and I'll have my Sanskrit and IE classes read it; they mostly know Latin). And I've been dithering over Delhi for some weeks now, so I'm deeply grateful to have it in better hands! I'll turn my attention directly to the mathematical ones, then. And then I hope to work on fleshing out Kalidasa and Mahabharata (as well as more math). Nifty stuff! A. Mahoney 15:47, 11 Maii 2011 (UTC)

Agree about linking Civitas sui iuris with en:Sovereign state; are there any objections, or should this just get done? A. Mahoney 21:14, 11 Maii 2011 (UTC)

It's a moving target of course, but as of this moment I believe we've got all 1000 of our pages! Euge! I've got more to do with Theoria numerorum but the skeleton is in place, and that was the last one. A. Mahoney 17:58, 25 Maii 2011 (UTC)

Mean & median?

Secunde Zephyre, is there a chance your computations could include the mean & median lengths of the 1000 articles? As measures of progress, these could be useful statistics. IacobusAmor 03:06, 28 Augusti 2010 (UTC)

Consummatum est! --SECUNDUS ZEPHYRUS 15:57, 28 Augusti 2010 (UTC)

Novum aevum

Bancocum, Lingua Francogallica, Lingua Sinica, Lingua Persica moderna super 10,000 sublevavi. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 13:15, 4 Septembris 2010 (UTC)

Iam addendae Lingua Esperantica et Lingua Sanscrita. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 15:47, 11 Septembris 2010 (UTC)

Mense Augusto 2011

Drat: I thought Mathematica was over 30K, counting the language weight and all. Will fix this for next month! But Theoria numerorum is the longest page on the topic in all of Wikiworld. A. Mahoney 15:54, 3 Augusti 2011 (UTC)

As are Cultura, Polytheismus, et Sexus. Your efforts with numbers are welcome! For planning ahead, Secundus Zephyrus's script was useful. Is there a way of running it, even though S.Z. isn't around? IacobusAmor 16:30, 3 Augusti 2011 (UTC)

I don't think so, but if someone wanted to it wouldn't be hard to re-create it, given that the code for the official list is posted. Or perhaps he'd share his version. My understanding is that such programs (bots generally) run on your own computer, fetching pages from Wikimedia's machines and, if necessary, sending back updates, but all the actual work goes on your own box. I therefore don't want to get into any of this from home on my beat-up creaky old laptop, but could (arguably should, I guess) run things at work. (Not a problem: I teach Latin. Thus anything I do here can count as research!) A. Mahoney 17:18, 4 Augusti 2011 (UTC)

Novus annus

We are still mired in 43rd place despite another month of good growth (and a small increase to our mean and median averages as well). I propose trying to crack the top 40 this calendar year. This means jumping over the good folks at Malayalam, Thai, and Lithuanian, while holding off the fast-growing Hindi. Anyone up for it? Happy 2012 to all. A. Mahoney 23:36, 3 Ianuarii 2012 (UTC)

Vicipaedia continues to show steady growth. The mean size of our 1000 articles has risen thus, month by month since August: 6243, 6281, 6306, 6328, 6416, 6493. In the same period, the ratio of our mean to the mean of the wiki immediately below us has changed thus: .833, .835, .836, .838, .847, .860. So our coverage is improving, both absolutely and relatively. ¶ As for jumping over the other good folks, extra exertion may not be necessary! If the newly proposed weights go into effect, some unsuspecting wikis are going to have the proverbial rug pulled out from under them! They've been outpacing us in part because of unearned strength in the weights. Latin's weight will stay the same, but the weights of 32 of the 42 wikis above us will fall, many drastically; for example, Malay, immediately above us now, will fall by 20 percent, to quite a few notches below us. (Details here.) So without touching a keyboard, we're poised to rise in the standings! IacobusAmor 01:00, 4 Ianuarii 2012 (UTC)

cool -- I'd missed that discussion. Of course our weight wouldn't change at all, A. Mahoney 15:38, 5 Ianuarii 2012 (UTC)

Yes, but the weights of many others would fall—so in the standings, expressed relatively, Latin would rise. IacobusAmor 15:55, 5 Ianuarii 2012 (UTC)

but that's OK. The meta-ites tend to take their time and look for consensus before changing anything, so I don't think this is imminent; on the other hand, one way to speed up the process might be to join that discussion. A. Mahoney 15:38, 5 Ianuarii 2012 (UTC)

Such joining has been done. ;) IacobusAmor 15:55, 5 Ianuarii 2012 (UTC)

We are no longer in 43rd place: we have cracked the top 40, with a month of spectacular growth earning us a yellow ribbon! Congratulations to everyone. A. Mahoney 13:09, 3 Februarii 2012 (UTC)

Macte! IacobusAmor 23:43, 4 Februarii 2012 (UTC)

I figured the new chemistry articles would be added shortly; I'd taken some references out of the library, but they're at school -- I'll flesh out Chemia and its new little friends during the month. A. Mahoney 23:35, 4 Februarii 2012 (UTC)

OK, if that's your bailiwick, you can have it! (I may add a few nexus.) IacobusAmor 23:43, 4 Februarii 2012 (UTC)

Please do -- nexus, verba, imagines, or whatever you like. I don't have formal background in chemistry at a scholarly level but have always thought it was rather fun: this is an excuse to play with it a little. Besides, you're already thoroughly occupied with geography! I'll keep plugging at the mathematical pages, too, but chemistry needs more attention right now. A. Mahoney 23:53, 4 Februarii 2012 (UTC)

Yes, I want to put the oceans in order. Me and Cnut. :/ IacobusAmor 01:16, 5 Februarii 2012 (UTC)

May 2012: we remain in 38th place, but we're catching up. We're one of only 19 Vicipaediae not missing any articles, so our score is relatively high even though our mean and median put us lower in the list (57th, 53rd respectively, by my count). We're only 4.37 behind number 30 (Croatian) and we've been growing faster than the VPs ahead of us: with two or three really strong months (like last February) we could crack the top 30! I've updated the table. A. Mahoney (disputatio) 17:58, 2 Maii 2012 (UTC)

Non intellexi omnia quae hic alieno sermone scripsistis, stipulaene etiam rationibus inlatae sunt? (Illas dico cum minus quam duabus sententiis ;-) Congratulor quidem! Teutonius (disputatio) 18:40, 12 Iulii 2012 (UTC)

Si collegae nostri linguam Latinam melius quam Anglicam scientes volunt adiuvare ut numerus nostrus in tabula officiali admelioremus, quam libentissime Latina vel aliis linguis utemur! Quot plures, tot melius! Quaeso, stipulas minusculas auge et corrige, et nescioquas alias paginas quoque! Ecce tabula magnitudinum paginarum apud nos. A. Mahoney (disputatio) 18:53, 12 Iulii 2012 (UTC)

Another table

Just for my own amusement, I've put together this table showing who's got how many of the 4 longest pages, in the table in meta. Since this is just a count of the Wikipedias named in that table, it reflects information from the start of last month: it's not a real-time count of all the 1000 Pages in all the Wikipedias, but just a summary of an existing table. But it is mildly interesting, for those who like such things, and another way of "keeping score" against the other Wikipedias. A. Mahoney (disputatio) 18:56, 31 Augusti 2012 (UTC)

Europa is on Meta's list of our ten most neglected, but I just put it over 10K a few minutes ago. Also regarding the "most neglected," the column headed "Ratio" in your earlier table has been quite useful: I used it this month to identify & boost maybe about fifteen of the articles where we were most at a disadvantage with the other wikis. IacobusAmor (disputatio) 19:37, 31 Augusti 2012 (UTC)

I admit I don't quite understand the algorithm for "neglected," except that it always include any missing pages (which we don't have), and the smallest page of the 1000 (even if it's big -- see Catalan). Pages that are close to a score boundary often get listed, but when there's nothing obvious like that, I don't see how the program picks our ten "neglected" pages every month. But I do look at the list, for what it's worth.

I know I've hardly pulled my weight this month, though I got a couple of pages updated. Start-of-term stuff really got out of hand. I have a few tweaks to Arithmetica and I do want to finish Logica (even carried a book in to the office this week, but never got to open it, never mind distill it into an article) -- at this point, those will come in next month's round-up. On the other hand, lots of other people have contributed and we should have a big score -- maybe even a Growth Ribbon! A. Mahoney (disputatio) 21:34, 31 Augusti 2012 (UTC)

Depth: the next frontier

We're doing reasonably well in the 1000 Pages standings, and we've passed thüüe 100,000 total articles mark. The next evaluation is depth -- see the big list at Meta. We're fifth from the bottom of the WPs in our size group by this measure. Depth is intended to measure how "collaborative" the WP is; it's defined here. Depth goes up when we edit an existing page, or when we add a page that isn't an article -- namely, a user page, a category, a template, a redirect, or a talk page. Depth goes down when we add a new article. Wikipediae with very low depth look like they're mainly generated by bots, and people tend to assume they're bogus. We are not bogus in the least but non-Latin-Vicipaediani don't always realize this. So, anybody up for raising our depth? A quick calculation shows that:

• if we add 5,383 new non-article pages (without concurrently adding any actual articles!) we'll increase our depth by 1
• if we make 261,877 edits on existing pages (in any namespace) we'll also increase our depth by 1

We're now at 10.7; we need to get above 16 to beat the next WPs in the table (Malay and Volapük). Shall we try? A. Mahoney (disputatio) 12:55, 3 Aprilis 2014 (UTC)

Very interesting -- and rather off-putting, too. That's an enormous number of article edits, compared with a trivially small number of non-article edits.

1. Talk pages: So am I right in thinking that by converting all our stipulae to "projects", and putting a project banner on all possible talk pages, we could increase our depth by about 18 to 20 at a stroke? I think that's terrible -- talk pages that contain no talk (there are millions on en:wiki) are a waste of a click (and the banners send many people to ask incomprehensible questions in "project talk" when they might better ask a question direct on the talk page and get a sensible answer). But it's also very tempting!
2. Categories: We already have much more detailed categorization than other wikis of our size (except Farsi, where they have copied all the categories from en:wiki without creating a structure for them). The problem here with creating more categories "for the sake of it" is that they would get in the way of the real aim, which is to encourage navigation among similar-and-related pages. And this is surely one of the ways in which people find articles they can improve. No, I am against expansion of categories "for the sake of it". [Afterthought: but every existing category can have a talk page. See above :) ]
3. Templates: Fine if they are easy to create and maintain; a bad thing when they make it more difficult for ordinary punters to edit pages. There is a possibility of using templates on a very large scale for bibliographical citations, as they do on fr:wiki -- I mean, in theory, one template for each cited book. It would take a while to set it up, though: not sure whether it would really repay the effort. Maybe there are other areas where multiple templates could really help us?
4. Redirects: I'd say we already have rather a lot of them, especially among Italian villages!
5. Editing existing pages: it's a real shame that this repays so little. I would be all for encouraging everybody to create less and improve more, but it would take an awful lot of that to improve depth even by 1 point.

Those are my immediate thoughts ... Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 14:06, 3 Aprilis 2014 (UTC)

I agree that creating essentially empty pages would not be the way to go, but it is an interesting statistic and it reminds us who our rivals are (those darn Volapükians!). Another frontier could be the English Wikipedia's list of 10,000 "vital expanded" articles, which is perhaps somewhat English-biased but not extremely so. It would take a while to translate the list, but it might provide some priorities (and give us some non-article pages for our depth statistics into the bargain!). Lesgles (disputatio) 14:57, 3 Aprilis 2014 (UTC)

There's another expanded list as well, a 10,000-page list at Meta, here. It's getting attention again, and there's now a "score" page for it as well (it's here, typically updated mid-month). That page uses the new language weights, too, just for fun (based on a larger translation sample); we're 46th, not half bad given that we haven't paid any attention to this, and we're missing over 4600 of the proposed articles. In principle the 1000 Pages are expected to be included in the longer list, but I don't think anyone's keeping careful track. Working on either of the expanded lists could be interesting.

I wouldn't want to create piles of useless pages -- near-empty categories, templates that only get used once -- but talk pages and user pages are fairly innocuous. What I would encourage is more editing -- "create less and improve more," as Andrew says -- though, yeah, each of the 200-odd active users would have to do over 1200 edits to raise depth by one. A. Mahoney (disputatio) 19:17, 3 Aprilis 2014 (UTC)

Definition of depth

The definition of depth assumes that inveterate tinkerers, perhaps like our Italian-hamlet person, add more to the collaborativity (!) of the project than those who work offline and contribute longer passages all at once. For one of the longest contributions in all of wikidom, see Cultura, whose initial publication apparently reduced the "depth" of the project! Had the same text been built up online, sentence by sentence, publicizing the hundreds of edits that occurred offline, "depth" would have risen. This makes no sense. IacobusAmor (disputatio) 15:49, 3 Aprilis 2014 (UTC)

Yes, a good point. I just want to verify one thing here, Anne (or anyone else who knows!) If Iacobus had written his epic Cultura in many, many edits, is it the case that this would have increased depth? Or does it require "true" collaboration, i.e. more than one editor? Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 16:14, 3 Aprilis 2014 (UTC)

No, it's not so smart: depth just takes the numbers from Specialis:Census (or respectively the Statistics special page of whatever wiki) and crunches them up. Thus edit wars increase depth, too. Periodically on Meta someone will point out that this is a moderately bogus measure, and the reply is usually "yeah, but it's what we can count." What we want is a measure of how good the articles are, which as Iacobus notes is utterly unrelated to the process by which they were created. But that is a whole lot harder. A. Mahoney (disputatio) 19:17, 3 Aprilis 2014 (UTC)

Why get alarmed about such a choking "depth" that is obviously based on a pitiful misunderstanding of the concept of 'collaboration'? If we do nothing, will we be punished? If we do all those conjurer's tricks, will we be rewarded? If that is what we're expected to do, why not get really "collaborative" and re-write the article on Culture letter by letter? A bad system deserves to be mocked! Neander (disputatio) 20:56, 3 Aprilis 2014 (UTC)

In my view the comments here have shown that we should not strive to increase "depth" as defined on meta, at least not just for the sake of it. Expanding on the "extended must-have" list seems to make much more sense to me, as this would help to cover gaps in our content. --UV (disputatio) 22:09, 3 Aprilis 2014 (UTC)

I hadn't seen the meta:List of Wikipedias by expanded sample of articles before. We are not so very far down in that list, but could clearly improve. Also the list itself is still open for improvement and slight expansion. It's an attractive idea to work on that, and to be involved in improving it at the same time.

Our generally negative reactions to the so-called depth measurements lead me to say that others are surely going to see the thing in the same way. Those measures are not taken so very seriously now, and are going to be adjusted whenever better measures can be devised. Hence, even less reason for us to be guided by them. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 08:40, 4 Aprilis 2014 (UTC)

I don't think anyone's particularly fond of "depth" as presently defined; discussion on Meta makes that clear (see e.g. the talk page for the Depth page). But I am concerned about discussion at the talk page for the big list, where the idea of flagging or stigmatizing low-depth WPs keeps coming up. The implicit assumption is that WPs with low depth are full of articles that get created by bots and never edited again. This is not what we do: our articles are created by people (OK, except the asteroids, but that was years ago), and we have hundreds of edits every day. But lots of our articles are short, and for some readers that's a red flag. See my own updates from last summer to en:Contemporary Latin for an example of how we've been perceived. A. Mahoney (disputatio) 15:48, 4 Aprilis 2014 (UTC)

I'm afraid I rarely go to meta, but I'll try to keep an eye on that discussion. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 16:11, 10 Aprilis 2014 (UTC)

I think also, though, that we should do what is best for the encyclopaedia we are making, and not worry too much what people say. We have a long way to go, but the kind of negative remarks you may see about Vicipaedia were made about the English Wikipedia too when it only had 100,000 articles.

Just one thing: I would really like to persuade everybody (which includes me!) to write a minimum length of text, and always to include at least one off-Wikipedia reference or link, when creating an article. Maybe our stipula/non stipula rule should include these things as firm requirements. But that would be for discussion on the Taberna (and in Latin of course), not here. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 14:56, 12 Aprilis 2014 (UTC)

That last point returns to Vicipaedia:Qualitas paginarum, which was briefly discussed a year or so ago; I think we all, or most of us, agree in principle that an article needs enough text -- however much that turns out to be. A. Mahoney (disputatio) 13:30, 14 Aprilis 2014 (UTC)

Mensura

As a test, I took the smallest category from the 10,000 list, Measurement, and translated it at Usor:Lesgles/Mensura. Looks pretty good, but we're still missing a few basic units, and there may be some troublesome translations; feel free to edit or discuss. Lesgles (disputatio) 18:03, 9 Aprilis 2014 (UTC)

I'd suggest going through Wikidata to start with, because this will pick up any pages we already have. I have a program that can do this -- it's how I got the updated 1000-page list at Vicipaedia:Paginae quas omnibus Wikipediis contineri oportet -- but I need to find a spare half-hour to point it at the 10,000-page list and see what we get. But manual work is also going to be necessary, as you've done here. A. Mahoney (disputatio) 12:29, 10 Aprilis 2014 (UTC)

For the 10,000 topics, generating a list of the same nature & structure as the one you generate monthly for the 1000 topics will be an excellent aid! IacobusAmor (disputatio) 12:31, 10 Aprilis 2014 (UTC)

I agree heartily. See my note on Lesgles's talk page: I don't believe what I asked for there is currently allowed, and your work would make the best start, Anne, whenever you have time to do it. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 12:52, 10 Aprilis 2014 (UTC)

It's not difficult. The list at Meta links to Wikidata rather than to :en; from there, one gets the link to the Latin page, if there is one. If there isn't, there might nonetheless be a Latin name for the Wikidata item, which would be a natural title for our page. See Usor:Amahoney/1000 Paginae tituli for a tidy human-readable match-up of Wikidata codes, Latin pages, and a few other languages' pages for the 1000-page list -- I use this as a cache so I don't have to go through Wikidata every time I want to update the stats table (Wikidata is so slow). Of course you all know what the end of a semester is like; this will be fun to do, once I get out from under Lucan, Lucian, Plutarch, Martial, Apollonius Rhodius, and Seneca! A. Mahoney (disputatio) 13:25, 10 Aprilis 2014 (UTC)

Your page, whenever you have time to make it, will surely be much faster to load than the list at meta. An arrangement by subject areas is handy of course, but those transclusions slow loading and navigation down to a crawl (for me, anyway). Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 15:53, 10 Aprilis 2014 (UTC)

That would indeed be great. I wondered if there was a way to generate a Latin list, but I couldn't find one, so I did the smallest category by hand. I did go through Wikidata to find the Latin names, though, so I think the red links on Usor:Lesgles/Mensura do indeed show pages that are lacking. Lesgles (disputatio) 16:04, 10 Aprilis 2014 (UTC)

Myrias paginarum

OK, I've made a first cut at the expanded list: Vicipaedia:Paginae quas omnibus Wikipediis contineri oportet/Expansio. I suggest you collapse the TOC to facilitate viewing. I hope to work on a report for these like the one for the 1000 Paginae, maybe automatically add all the pages on the list to the new [[Categoria:Myrias]], stuff like that -- probably next week around giving and grading final exams. The league tables at Meta get updated around the middle of the month; right now, we are 46th. A. Mahoney (disputatio) 13:20, 1 Maii 2014 (UTC)

Macte! This work will prove most useful. ¶ Note that those tables are giving Latin a weight of 1.070 instead of 1.1. The more precise weight derives from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We can improve our score overall by increasing our weight, and we can do that by getting the authorities to use a more concise Latin translation of the text—not, for example, the one here (in case that's the one the authorities used). ::winkwink:: IacobusAmor (disputatio) 14:27, 1 Maii 2014 (UTC)

Interesting point, Iacobe!

This material is really useful. I find the page takes about 30 seconds to load, not bad at all, and it is then perfectly easy to navigate quickly, unlike the one at meta. Thanks to a tweak by UV, Iacobus and I no longer see contents pages. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 14:31, 1 Maii 2014 (UTC)

I'm surprised you find this easier to navigate than at Meta, since I copied exactly the same structure --- all the transclusions, headings, and column divisions. Wonder what's different in our wiki? A. Mahoney (disputatio) 16:24, 1 Maii 2014 (UTC)

I don't know why either, but it is definitely true. The pages take a roughly equal time to load, but, after that, each click on the strap moves our page down almost instantaneously, while at meta at each click on the strap it hangs for a couple of seconds. And it's a very long page. So, in fact, I never got near the end of the meta page: I couldn't wait. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 17:44, 1 Maii 2014 (UTC)

Bene factum est; that's quite a task last for the next 10 years or so. There are even some Roman history ones remaining (search for "Roman"), although some priorities of Vicipaedia are missing from the list in return; no Cicero, for instance! :) Lesgles (disputatio) 23:18, 2 Maii 2014 (UTC)

Since the list at meta hasn't ever reached 10 000 it is open for additions (but that situation won't last for ever). I have started just for myself a list of possible additions and will put it on a user sub-page later today in case anyone else wants to comment. Tacitus was my first thought -- personal preference -- but I couldn't argue with Cicero! I will try adding a few at meta soon (not all classical) and see if there is a reaction. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 08:51, 3 Maii 2014 (UTC)