I know, let's get this article into every Wikipedia possible!

[pne]

I'm not sure which such article I first came across... I think some small town in Poland. Then it was the True Jesus Church.

Recently, while looking at someone's talk page on the Lojban (I think it was) Wikipedia, I saw a request to create an article for Almazán. And today, I saw an article on Uetersen on the Pennsylvania Dutch Wikipedia which had dozens of interwiki links.

*sigh*

I wish people would stop doing that sort of thing. Once or maybe twice might be interesting. Possibly even more, for things that really are relevant to many people all over the globe -- perhaps a country, or a world religion. But little towns?

I mean, it's kind of cute that so many Wikipedias have an article about Uetersen, since I grew up right next door in Tornesch (from when I was 6 until I moved out from my parents', who still live there). But I still don't quite see the point for an article about Uetersen in, say, Norfolk/Pitcairn, or Zhuang, or Kazakh. I'm sure many, many small Wikipedias have much more important topics they could use articles on.

And from a couple of translations I looked at, some were even in English. Or, at best, they're a one-sentence stub. And then, really, what's the point? Seeing that "Uetersen is a town in Germany, near Hamburg" is about as useful as omitting the article entirely. (Especially if there's not even an article on Germany in that Wikipedia!) It just seems like an attempt at one-upmanship along the lines of "My lemma is in more Wikipedias than yours".

You know what? I think I might not even mind if the person adding the entry to all those Wikipedias did it himself, with his own knowledge of the languages. That's quite a feat. (Especially if the entry consists of more than one sentence -- say, two paragraphs or so.) But asking volunteers on that Wikipedia to translate your stub for you seems so pointless to me. I kind of wish they wouldn't comply with such requests. Let the competitive guys learn enough of over a hundred languages that they can compose two paragraphs of grammatically-correct and idiomatic insert language here, and then they can insert an article on their favourite little village.

...I'm wondering what mood to pick for this entry. "Annoyed" doesn't quite fit; somehow, the topic doesn't seem important enough to warrant that mood. "Weary" might fit it better, perhaps, even though it's not a system mood and doesn't have a mood pic.

---

Edit: When I told Stella about this, she seemed a bit amused and told me I was worrying over something that was not my problem at all. If someone wants to spam their town all over Wikipedia, why should that be my problem? If someone on the Lower Slobovian Wikipedia wants to help that person by translating their text into Lower Slobovian, why not let them?

Perhaps she has a point. I just can't make myself be un-annoyed at the whole thing so easily.

Comments

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Bizarrely, the Welsh article calls it dinas yn ne-orllewin yr Almaen "a city in southwestern Germany".

[elgrande.livejournal.com]

I'm usually more annoyed when people delete articles on wikipedia. Especially articles on conlangs seem to be in danger of being deleted because some people think of them as irrelevant. What annoys me about this is that I assume the people who make those decisions are not interested in conlangs and so do not really know what is relevant or irrelevant about them.


"You know what? I think I might not even mind if the person adding the entry to all those Wikipedias did it himself, with his own knowledge of the languages."

I haven't checked the Esperanto version of wikipedia for some time. But last time I checked it actually had the problem that everybody and their dog thought they knew enough Esperanto to write articles and so the language level was very low and the articles were full of mistakes. Then I still prefer people refraining from writing in a language they don't know very well (at least if the number of people who could correct articles is low compared to the number of writers).


"I'm sure many, many small Wikipedias have much more important topics they could use articles on."

I don't see what harm is being done. On the other hand, people's motivation to get an article into every language version of wikipedia is incomprehensible to me.

[pne.livejournal.com]

I'm usually more annoyed when people delete articles on wikipedia. Especially articles [... where] the people who make those decisions are not interested [...] and so do not really know what is relevant or irrelevant about them.

Ah yes, that's annoying, too. I'm an inclusionist, not a deletionist. What harm does it do if there's an article on subject X, especially if it's well-written?

And yes, the people deciding that sort of stuff tend not to know what's notable and not in that sector. How could they? Not everyone can know everything. But then perhaps they should not make such decisions so lightly.

[ubykhlives.livejournal.com]

I wrote a userbox template for users of the Ubykh language which was deleted just a couple of days ago. It took up maybe a few thousand bytes at most - as you say, what's the harm? - but it was actually nominated for speedy deletion (despite the fact that I was interested to discover I was not the only user on Wikipedia who used the userbox).

[ubykhlives.livejournal.com]

No, I'd have to agree with you. I found it rather amusing when I was asked to translate the article for Kurów (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurów) into Ubykh, when the person who asked me didn't think about the facts that (a) there would be more important articles I could be working on if (b) there even was an Ubykh Wikipedia, so even if I was willing to put there is a town in Poland called Kurów on a stub, I couldn't.

Nonetheless, you can still satisfy your curiosity by having the Kurów stub in Yoruba, kiKongo, Tok Pisin, Anglo-Saxon, Basque, Avar, Frisian, Quechua, Norfuk, Aymara, Chechen, Latin, and any living Celtic language (and yes, that includes Cornish and Manx).

I mean, what's the point unless someone in those languages is likely to go looking the topic up? And call me a cynic, but when is any speaker of Quechua or Chechen ever going to be interested?

[pne.livejournal.com]

I mean, what's the point unless someone in those languages is likely to go looking the topic up?

Good point.

Which also ties in with the inclusionist/deletionist thing - I'm sure there are more English speakers who would be likely to lookup a random webcomic or constructed language (say, perhaps a dozen?) than there are speakers of Quechua likely to look up Kurów, or speakers of Chechen likely to look up Uetersen.