Directory:Akahele/Ten new Wikipedia articles

Over the Labor Day weekend last month, I thought it might be interesting to make a short case study of 10 new articles created on Wikipedia. So, I monitored ten brand-new, freshly-created articles, in order of their creation across a span of a few minutes. Let's see what has happened to each of them after the first month.

• Lido Palace

The story of a thoroughbred racehorse, this article has about 5 other articles linking to it, and it gets about 3 page views per day.

• The Bohemes

This is a rather promotional article about a Dutch indie rock band, having no other articles linking to it, and getting about 3 page views per day. The band members are nicknamed Dingers, Doodles, Bongos, and Whiskers. How cute. The article was created by a new User named "Libertine33" who had never before made an edit on Wikipedia, and hasn't made one since The Bohemes. The author made it a considerable point to attest how The Bohemes have been compared to English rockers, The Libertines, although no source supporting that claim was provided. Indeed, if one were to search the legitimate news archives, no independent source makes this claim. But this is typical for Wikipedia, a great compendium of unsubstantiated opinion.

• Jesse Neal

An article about an American professional wrestler. This page has about 75 other Wikipedia articles linking to it, because pages about pro wrestlers are a very prolific and important component of Wikipedia's effort to document all things related to fan-based culture. The new article has been getting about 300 page views per day, by far the most popular of these 10 new articles. It was authored by Richard "Wrestler" Lopez, who claims to be a retired professional wrestler and now a "wrestling journalist" by dint of his past work for a failed magazine, which led to a job as a waiter, which led to his opening a Blogger account. As you read this self-written tale of Lopez, you begin to take more interest in his life story than that of his subject, Jesse Neal. Another characteristic of Wikipedia -- the drama of the editors often outweighs the story in situ.

• Nico samaras

This was an interesting case. The article didn't last long (46 minutes) before being deleted by a Wikipedia administrator. It had been getting about 1 page view attempt per day. This was apparently the second time the article's creation had been attempted in several months, and both times, the sole purpose of the content was to defame and attack the subject. This is one of Wikipedia's most criticized flaws -- it is a powerful online defamation platform.

While I will not repeat the entire content of the deleted article, it may be useful to the reader to see just how Wikipedia was exploited in this case to tarnish the reputation of Samaras. The article described him as surrounded by "fraud allegations" and in the public eye for his "open homosexuality". The article closed with a rather outlandish claim, that Samaras "recently engaged with various aquatic and beachcombing business enterprises, most notably a singular idea to establish a chain of seaweed restaurants across Holland and France." This is an encyclopedia, they say?

• Ian Sinclair (voice actor)

This article showcases the fact that Sinclair is a voice actor for the Funimation production company. Actually, other than listing the roles Sinclair has played, this is about all the article mentions about Sinclair. Only two other articles in Wikipedia link to this one, and it's garnering only about 6 page views per day.

• Bytown Railway Society

After about two weeks, this one was also deleted by a Wikipedia administrator, as the content was found to be a copyright violation, released under a free license without permission. Nobody seems to have broken a sweat about that, since the article was getting only about 1 attempted page view per day.

• Eco Trend Incorporated

Deleted within an hour, as the importance of the subject wasn't substantiated by the article. Virtually no attempted page views. Another waste of time on Wikipedia.

• Yitzhak Coren

A fairly extensive biography about an Israeli politician. Unfortunately, he is about 150 times less interesting to readers than the article about the pro wrestler, as Coren's article obtains about 2 page views per day.

• Saari Raat

Deleted speedily as an outright copyright violation. About 1 attempted page view per day.

• Ian Kwok

This one was almost certainly a spoof, a joke. It was getting about 330 page views per day while published, then only about 1 or 2 attempted page views per day after deletion.

The article discussed the accomplishments of one Ian Kwok, a professional badminton instructor, purportedly the coach of the Singapore national team. He was also a volleyball coach and a Frisbee coach (for the non-existent Singapore Frisbee International Team). He enjoys playing the violin.

The rundown

So, out of ten new articles on Wikipedia, how did they fare?

One article (Jesse Neal) seemed to be quite popular and accurate enough. The other four remaining legitimate articles are not very popular at all, so you have some level of accomplishment, but very little recognition or overall utility. Fifty percent of the ten articles survived more than two weeks.

The other fifty percent did not exist after two weeks. One was likely a complete joke, another was a deliberate attack page, and the other three might arguably merit inclusion if only they were authored properly without violating copyright -- though you'd suspect that even if this were done, the pages wouldn't attract more than a handful of daily page views.

Were a larger sample to have been taken, do you suspect that only 50% of new Wikipedia articles survive for more than a week or two? Do you suppose that only 10% actually survive and garner a level of traffic that sets them apart from the odd curiosity, as was the case with the Jesse Neal article?

One thing is clear. With over 3 million articles in place on the English Wikipedia, the heady days of "help us build the encyclopedia, create the article you were looking for" are well bygone. Another thing is fairly clear. The articles that I personally created recently seem to serve more people's needs than at least 80%-90% of Wikipedia's other new articles. But, now that I've been blocked from editing Wikipedia, the encyclopedia won't be getting any more such useful, well-written articles from me.

Comments

9 Responses to “ Ten new Wikipedia articles ”

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Neil Baker Interesting idea and taking a look at new articles goes some way to showing how close Wikipedia is to the point of saturation.

My own view is that I’d rather they were working more on getting “essential” articles up to scratch and then locking them, but that’ll never happen.

Because of that, and because of the constant search to create a “new” article, the result is “news-style” creations and splits/forks/coatracks from existing articles.

Given the amount of content now on Wikipedia, and given the vast majority is of a terrible quality, it would make perfect sense to end open editing and send the experts in.

I shan’t hold my breath.

Dan T. Is “Saari Raat” pronounced “sorry rat”?

Edward Buckner Very good, but be careful of the obvious implication that people will try to draw: that Wikipedia is full up, or has reached saturation point, 3m articles etc.

Its coverage of academic and scholarly subjects – the real stuff of an encyclopedia – is woefully inadequate. My own tutor, who died recently and was one of the great and good of the academic establishment, still has no article.

The red links in the list below suggest that Wikipedia is a long way from being ‘filled up’

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IEEE_publications http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_philosophy_journals

Even when there is a blue link to follow, what you find on the other side is usually poorly written and inaccurate.

Arooj J. The issue seems to be bleeding over into related articles. I was poking around The Bohemes article and it seems as if the original author is trying to inject The Bohemes into the articles of other bands.

Gregory Kohs Arooj, it would appear you’re talking about the efforts of a user named “Smith Jones”. He was not the original author of the article about The Bohemes. It would seem fairly clear, though, that he’s a reader of Akahele!

CaliforniaSmith I have a hard time reading this site due to its (to me) ugly layout.

I am not a picky reader and rarely notice a web pages layout.

But, in this case – something about the site makes it very unappealing to read.

It may be the grey bars on the sides.

My monitor resolution is 1280×1024.

Could you take a poll to see if anyone else feels as I do and then somehow fix the layout?

Thanks California Smith

p.s. I rarely run around criticizing people or web pages, but you do seem like a reasonable man who would listen. I understand that the content of a page should be more important than how the page is arranged, but I really think a better layout would retain readers to your blog.

Do you have your own monitor set up in portrait mode?

Gregory Kohs I agree, the site’s layout leaves a great deal to be desired. Frankly, on a 100-point allocation scale, I would suspect that layout/design flaws are contributing about 12 to 14 points to our Alexa ranking stagnation (currently hovering around the 400,000th most popular websites). Surely, though, about 30 to 40 points are attributable to “content not interesting enough to me”, and another 20 to 30 points must go to “poor cross-channel marketing”.

The struggle is that we got this site off the ground as a nearly unfunded non-profit, and we took an available layout from a batch of WordPress templates that were already pre-fabricated.

Surely, we could find a better layout, or perhaps style one from scratch. But, (and I believe I speak for the other three directors) I think that until we at least cracked the top 100,000 Alexa sites, we did not have the time or motivation to work on design issues.

I certainly appreciate your feedback. If you have any specific recommendations for a new WordPress layout, please post them here, or contact me privately. I’m not hard to track down.

CaliforniaSmith I know nothing about WordPress or web page layout but I did find this in a Google search.

If this is possible – try going to the Theme Options -> layout, and look at “Layout WIDTH and type (FLUID or FIXED)” where you can choose a fluid, rather than a fixed, width. That may fix the issue.

I am interested in maintaining the supply of Greg Kohs kerfuffle available on the internet – and I believe that increased web traffic to this site would aid me in that goal.

p.s. I had always assumed that the word kerfuffle was Yiddish, but when I looked up a more detailed definition – it appears that the word is actually Scottish.

Anthony DiPierro I think what Greg’s trying to say is “patches welcome”. And, of course, cash is welcome too. We’re not a 501(c)(3), so you can’t deduct your contribution. But you’re more than welcome to make it. Make checks payable to “Internet Review Corporation”. Contact Greg for a mailing address.