Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-03-18/News and notes

This week in history
How far we've come! Res Mar 02:32, 19 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Heh. I remember that prediction; one of my few predictions about Wikipedia that came true: what I did was to chart trends, figure out how fast the numbers of articles were doubling, & make my best estimate. Reading this article got me thinking: based on current trends, I think it's fair to say the English language Wikipedia won't reach 5 million articles before 2017, & I'm willing to bet the mortgage money that it'll never reach 10 million articles. (A short explanation of my reasons why can be found here.) -- llywrch (talk) 20:37, 21 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Good reasons at hour link, yes. You're probably right, but one countervailing force could be improved machine translation from other-language Wikipedias, and increased connectivity in the global south. An awful lot of bios and settlement articles have yet to be written and/or translated from the extra-Euro-American sphere.
 * In my experience, other-language Wikipedias too often prove a disappointment. Lately I've been working on articles related to the Empire of Trebizond; the most recent work in this area have been in Greek & Russian, although Émile Janssens's work published in 1969 is more recent than the latest standard reference in English, published in 1926; other languages in which useful information could be expected include French & Turkish. So I turned to those four Wikipedias in hope to find summaries of this research, only to find in 3 of the 4 cases translations of older versions of the articles in the English Wikipedia. (The exception was the French Wikipedia.) It appears that the simplest way for articles to be created in those languages is to translate them from the English Wikipedia -- not to avail themselves of better sources in their own language. (I'd love to have some hints about the latest research on this topic in Turkish.) BTW, many of the articles in Amharic & Oromo about Ethiopia come from the English Wikipedia, a fact I know well because I wrote them, & can recognize the sources in the footnotes. (And honestly, I wish it were not the case.) -- llywrch (talk) 04:06, 22 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Wrongo ;) 68.119.84.69 (talk) 01:25, 13 October 2016 (UTC)

SUL

 * One correction to the SUL part of this: there were significant resources assigned to the SUL finalisation in July, August and September 2014 as a result of the project being declared to be a top quarterly priority. A rather significant amount was achieved in that period, and a number of key features were developed and deployed. There is an overview of that in this presentation and in the July, August, September and October status updates. This time period was the turning point at which the SUL finalisation really started to become possible. --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 06:39, 21 March 2015 (UTC)
 * I finally got around to reading the final copy, and I agree. Dan shepherded the seriously hard engineering work last summer to get this all together. It's well worth a correction, if possible. Keegan (WMF) (talk) 04:06, 27 March 2015 (UTC)
 * ✅ Res Mar 22:01, 28 March 2015 (UTC)


 * I'll be glad to see the completion of SUL at last - I've been unable to complete SUL of my accounts because there's apparently a sign-on in my name on the closed mo.wikipedia, which can't be edited. I can't imagine why I would ever have wanted to edit in Moldovan! -- Arwel Parry (talk) 07:28, 21 March 2015 (UTC)