Proposals for closing projects/Radical cleanup of Volapük Wikipedia

This is not a request about closing the Volapük Wikipedia. This is a request about deleting all minor bot generated articles in Volapük Wikipedia and moving it back to the Wikimedia Incubator.

Detailed rationale:

• There had been a request closing Volapük Wikipedia, which has resulted in a keep decission for the time being out of various reasons such as the historical impact of Volapük.
• Mainly people were simply upset by the massive robot generated articles (more than 100'000 in a very short time frame) of the virtual single Volapük Wikipedia contributor Smeira and were angry about a flood of new mainly useless interwiki links in their Wikipedias, cheating of edit statistics compared to their non-primarily bot generated Wikipedias, abuse of Wikimedia ressources, no use of the bot articles for interested readers and many more (see the old closing proposal for more points). Furthermore a Wikipedia driven by a single person is not in agreement with our principles such as the Neutral point of view.
• In contrast to every other Wikipedia that used bot generated articles to a larger extent, almost 100% of Volapük Wikipedia content (page numbers and bytes) were generated by a bot and therefore almost every article contains the same sentences with just different numbers. Wikipedia is not a database of uniform entries (such as numbers). Wikipedia is an encyclopedia which predominantly incorporates summary texts describing the unique features of its items in indvidual texts.
• The Lombard Wikipedia had among other things a similar problem with bot generated articles (and therefore also had a request closing it). All minor bot generated articles of Lombard Wikipedia were deleted in order to make room for a healthy Lombard Wikipedia (the number of articles therefore dropped from 117'000 to 23'000).

I therefore ask for adminship rights in Volapük Wikipedia or any other appropriate measure in order to remove the articles from Volapük Wikipedia, which were not written or substantially expanded by humans. Furthermore I ask to move Volapük Wikipedia to the Wikimedia Incubator until it has a steady community of contributors.

I think this is a fair and balanced request, which should be adapted to similar cases in future if it works out. Arnomane 22:38, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

Support request

1. Support. Arnomane 22:38, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

   May I ask why you don't want to close it, but want to move it to the Incubator? It's a little bit ... --OosWesThoesBes 11:04, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

   ...to small in real encyclopedic size and too small in community (see above I answered this prior to your question in my request). Arnomane 11:39, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

   I hope you have considered MF-Warburg's and Slomox's points below. There are thousands of human-created stubs on vo.wp that you presumably would not delete. The final size would still be too big for the incubator (where the average project has only a few tens of articles). How do you propose to solve the problems MF-Warburg mentions? --Smeira 00:01, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

   ...exaggerated, since you haven't even discussed this question within the vo.wp community itself (you, Arnomane, haven't addressed this question yet). --Smeira 12:37, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

2. Support Petar Marjanovic 01:36, 26 December 2007 (UTC)
3. Support DaB. 03:31, 26 December 2007 (UTC) Fewer then 3% of edits are made by humans the last 30 days

   Note that 95% of these edits improved quality by correcting erros, adding new information, etc. --Smeira 12:37, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

4. Support Ureinwohner 10:32, 26 December 2007 (UTC)
5. Support --Aphaia 11:18, 26 December 2007 (UTC)
6. Support --APPER 11:34, 26 December 2007 (UTC)
7. Support Liesel 11:56, 26 December 2007 (UTC)
8. Support, but better close Spampedia altogether. Fossa_?! 15:11, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

   The arguments you mentioned in the closure proposal were answered. Would you happen to have anything new to add -- other than offending labels like Spampedia? --Smeira 01:33, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

   I didn't even vote in the closure proposal, as it appeared futile to do so, let alone put forth some arguments. The flooding of Volapuek-Interwikis is certainly not my high priority amelioration project. So, Death to Volapuek will do for now as my argument. Fossa_?! 14:07, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

   I didn't say you voted in the closure proposal, I merely said the arguments you mentioned there had been answered. It's good that you've come out of the closet as a Volapük hater. That makes it easier to guess the kind of arguments you probably have. You're right: better not mention them. Have a good time working on the other items of your priorities list! --Smeira 23:59, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

   Fossa please consider that your strong words aren't exactly a help for this request. Arnomane 02:39, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

9. Support, or even better close vo-WP. Chaddy 22:40, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

   A comment: someone with this username (Chaddy) has just vandalized five pages on vo.wp (check the dif links from his "contributions" page here). Do you happen to be the same person? If so, you must be aware that this is not appropriate behavior. As for closing: do you happen to have any good arguments? Please take into account the answers given in the discussion of the closure proposal. --Smeira 01:05, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

   I did not vandalize, I only proposed these articles for speedy deletion (e. g. [1]). This isn´t vandalism. But your removal of this requests without any comment (e. g. [2]) is. And that you have blocked my account after that is abuse of your admin rights. I did not want to discuss about this here, but after your comment I feel impelled to comment about this topic too.

   I discuss you case below, Chaddy. Considering the occurrence of cases of real vandalism that started exactly like yours (see the proposal for closure for further documentation), I think my mistake is understandable. Now your account has been deblocked, you are a full member of the Volapük community, and you can start helping us make it a better project. There's a lot of work to do, and we sure could use some help. That's why you opened the account, isn't it? --Smeira 23:35, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

   @555: Stop spamming, please. Chaddy 16:17, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

   You have the right to vote, I have the right to know why you have voted for deletion, sorry. 555 16:42, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

   I agree with 555. Arguments, please! --Smeira 23:35, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

   And what did that IP wrong? Achates 21:16, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

   Oh, was that you? Same mistake here; read the description of Chaddy's case in the section about it below. When I read the comment, I immediately thought I had yet another de.wp vandal (there were tens of them during the closure proposal; I was really surprised with the level of aggressivity these people had). If you look at that page, you'll see that I immediately realized my mistake and restored the interwiki link (and even added a picture). --Smeira 00:21, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

   Does that really matter? It seems to me, that your half-baked vo-policy is "Germans are bad", isn't it? Cos you act that way... :-( Achates 05:53, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

   No, Achates. Actually we have German contributors as well. Smeira behaved that way because of the edit summary that you (was it you?) wrote which was, let's admit it, a not very nice one. True that he didn't realize it was a good edit at first but he promptly realized it and restored it. Malafaya 10:45, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

   Precisely, Malafaya. Here's an example: consider the edits of User Zifs, all also about links to German Gemeinde: none of them has been reverted, despite the fact that he was German. There were many other anynonymous edits on German Gemeinde (presumably also by Germans) who corrected details and were not reverted (here's an example; notice that this anonymous user corrected the population figure). For an example of my welcome to another German -- note that I was polite to him, even though he had voted in favor of the closure proposal, and is here now voting in favor of this proposal -- see vo:Gebanibespik:Liesel). So, there is no anti-German policy at vo.wp, even though it is true that most vandals on vo.wp come from de.wp (not all, of course; there are vandals from other places too.vo:User:St. Anger started by vandalizing my home page, then had a discussion with me, calmed down, and became a normal user. He lives in Israel.) It looks to me like you're trying to invent a discrimination case against me, and used the provocation of that IP-address (I think I can safely say the edit comment was a provocation?). If this is the case, it does matter whether or not you are that IP-address, don't you think? If you are, then you behaved improperly, and with bad intentions. --83.85.142.49 11:10, 28 December 2007 (UTC) --That was me: Smeira 11:14, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

10. very strong support (if not close). This language has 20 (sic!) speakers - not only natives and had less than 10 popular years between 1880 and 1890. There is not even a small use ("market") for such a WP version (not comparable with "dead languages", which have _way more_ speakers) and it's a private project of a far to small community to have even a small chance to be NPOV (Volapük has _20_ speakers, out of which only a part will be WP users, I guess. Compare: Klingon has 16.). In short: make this a Wikia-Project at most. --TheK 23:01, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

    You're confusing this with a proposal for closure; since this Wikipedia will still exist regardless of the result of this vote, why are talking about "market" and making comparisons to dead languages and Klingon? But since you want to discuss the viability of Volapük instead of this proposal... Can you name the number of speakers of Old English (the Englisc Wikipedia), which you implicitly considered worthy of keeping unchanged? There are no native speakers of Volapük, but the "dead languages" that you say have _way more_ speakers also have no native speakers. How are they better than Volapük as a language? Private project: again, how many contributors does the Old English Wikipedia have? Haven't you noticed that most of the WF projects (there are so many in small languages) have very small communities, with the same POV problem you mention? Again, how is Volapük worse? And, about POV: can you mention any page on vo.wp, article or even talk page, where this potential problem -- NPOV -- is exemplified? Is this more of a "theoretical threat" that's not really real in the case of vo.wp? --Smeira 01:33, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

11. support --Histo 00:21, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
12. Support Too many articles for such unpopular language. Most articles aren't necessary for this language.--Certh 04:10, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
13. support --Hillock65 05:54, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
14. Support. As I stated in the closing request, I consider hundreds of thousands of practically useless interwiki edits in all WMF projects the biggest problem with this project. Note that this was not a side effect: these interwikis seem to be the main goal of the bot owner, and the rationale behind is simple: maybe some people will notice and will join Volapük Wikipedia community. This idea of attracting maybe a couple of new users with millions edits in WMF projects is exactly what makes this strategy a spam ∴ Alex Smotrov 06:05, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

    Actually, Sasha, I had never thought about interwikis (as I made clear in the discussion of the closure proposal); I was thinking more in terms of the List of Wikipedias at Meta. It sincerely never occurred at me that someone would click on an interwiki link to Volapük just out of curiosity... There's no "maybe"; new active contributors have joined, actually. A question: why are interwiki edits useless? Because the vo.wp articles are stubs? But think: most interwiki links are to stubs, even those that are not to vo.wp. If you don't believe me, get any article with lots of interwiki links from ru.wp and then click on all the interwiki links that you see there: most of them are to small projects, where the articles are usually short or stubs. The real truth is: There are millions of short or stub-like articles in all Wikipedias, and most interwiki links are to them. If I had to guess, I'd say links to Volapük stubs are less than 10% of the total; en.wp, fr.wp, pl.wp have a lot more stubs than vo.wp, and are responsible for most of the interwiki links to stubs -- or even to bot-stubs, since there are more bot-stubs outside of vo.wp than inside of it. Would you like to check the numbers? (And there is of course the question of why you think interwiki links to stubs are useless -- what's the reason?) --Smeira 00:18, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

15. Support --Dapeteばか 07:07, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
16. Support Yann 14:32, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

    Support --Cometstyles 15:03, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

    Well the Proposal is about deleting all minor bot generated articles in Volapük Wikipedia and moving it back to the Wikimedia Incubator to which I agree to because its very similar to the recent clean-up of the Lombard Wikipedia where thousands of articles which were created by bots were deleted and the mess taken care of..--Cometstyles 17:23, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

    A proposal in the terms of Slomox (see below) is acceptable. Even with 1 or 2 active users, Lombard Wiki did not move to Incubator. Moving it there means losing all the 'community work' (non-articles) and rewriting all that part from scratch (How would it be if all those support pages in en.wiki suddenly had to be rewritten?). Moreover, why would it be in the Incubator? vo.wiki has enough community to stay as a Wikipedia (remember there are projects accepted with just 2 participants; Volapük has at least that). As this proposal is, it's worse than closure because it will have the same effect (shutdown and moving to Incubator) but at the expense of losing most articles which wouldn't happen with simple closure. Malafaya 18:19, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

    Yes, I agree with Malafaya. The differences between this proposal and the Lombard one, in my opinion, are:
    a. bot-stubs were a smaller problem for lmo.wp, and "the" problem for vo.wp;
    b. The transfer-to-incubator part makes this proposal equivalent to closure, because of the technical problems that MF-Warburg mentions below; in the lmo.wp case, the closure was more clearly stated.
    c. some of the supporters of the Lombard closure proposal were from lmo.wp and were actually interested in improving the quality of lmo.wp (they are right now working on that there); none of the supporters here has ever done anything to help vo.wp, and even Arnomane, the proposer, does not seem to want to do anything positive to improve vo.wp -- at least s/he made no propositions other than deleting stubs. I don't think anybody here, supporter or opposer, really thinks Arnomane's proposal will do anything to improve vo.wp. --Smeira 23:30, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

17. Support Achates 21:16, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
18. Support --Jeroenvrp 03:00, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
19. Support. Projects of questionable legitimacy need to be kept on a tighter leash. -- Visviva 10:09, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
20. Support --Meldor 19:02, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
21. Support. Any speaker of Volapük can speak at least one other language with a real speaker base. I can't see why a group of 20 or so people are granted the privilege of having a Wikipedia just for themselves. The fact that Smeira is the only user in Volapük Wikipedia and that most of its articles are bot-written just gives further evidence that Volapük Wiki is utterly useless. Bring Volapük back to the incubator and let it try to grow - fair and square. -- Leptictidium 19:36, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

    Hi again Leptictidium. As I said on your talk page, there may be reasons for Wikipedias for small communities (see also the appropriate sections in the first closure proposal). But this is not so important: if this proposal is not about whether or not Volapük should have a Wikipedia, but merely about whether or not stubs should be deleted, then your reason is beside the point (i.e. you're arguing that vo.wp shouldn't exist, since it has too few speakers, and this is not the point of this proposal, as Arnomane made clear in the first sentence of his rationale). --Smeira 03:58, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

    Hello Smeira. I am arguing that vo.wp shouldn't exist in its present state, but that it should be given a chance to improve. And I think Arnomane's proposal is a good chance and way of improving. -- Leptictidium 13:33, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

22. Support. It's the perfect road for this problem.--Carles 19:43, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
23. Support--Dúnadan 22:44, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
24. Support deleting the articles generated by a bot. Otherwise the project can continue to create high quality content. --Jannex 01:47, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

    Please be aware that by voting "support" you're voting in the proposal as a whole: deletion of articles AND move to Incubator. Malafaya 01:49, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

    I think all this disgusting votation could be avoided if mass-created bot stubs would be deleted, as happened in lombard wikipedia, but it should come as a personal initiative from the administradors in Volapük, after seeing how it is rarifying the whole Wikimedia community. Even Jimbo Wales has asked it not to appear on the List of Wikipedias classification. --Meldor 15:39, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

25. Support. --Remulazz 08:46, 31 December 2007 (UTC) I don't want to see every bot article deleted. I just think that the ratio bot articles/total articles should be kept quite low, if possible much less than 1, and not, like vo.wiki and the former lmo.wiki, equal to 50, 100, 200, etc... --Remulazz 14:26, 29 December 2007 (UTC) No. I have just read what Warburg wrote below. Moving to incubator is too heavy, and I think that wo.wp doesn't deserve that. But I would like to point out that bots must be used cum grano salis, and not used to inflate the number of articles beyond the environmental limit. My vote is suspended. --Remulazz 14:40, 29 December 2007 (UTC)
26. Support --Reinhard 17:45, 29 December 2007 (UTC)
27. Support --RR 00:23, 30 December 2007 (UTC)
28. Support --Thialfi 02:57, 30 December 2007 (UTC)
29. Support --Kawana 21:22, 30 December 2007 (UTC)
30. Support. efforts like that make more sense in other wiki-projects - even for bots! --ulli purwin 13:57, 31 December 2007 (UTC)
31. Support --Sailko 15:45, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

Oppose request

1. Oppose Nonsense. The articles of Volapük are different from those on lombard. Volapük's articles are not messy and contain useful information. I have used and am still using Volapük's articles to get information about villages, towns and cities all over the world. So I'm opposing this. --OosWesThoesBes 10:58, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

   I have to question this... You seem to have excellent command of English, at the very least; why would you rely on bot-generated stubs when much higher-quality information is available elsewhere? -- Visviva 10:11, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

   Note that much of the original information in the English Wikipedia was also bot-generated; so if he wanted to transfer manually this information by translating the equivalent English articles/stubs, he would (a) be translating bot-created text, and (b) getting the same result a bot would give: pages with standard text and changing numbers. --Smeira 04:01, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

2. Oppose hard on the heels on a denied proposal for closing the project and without a practical project proposal, I think it is in bad taste. GerardM 11:13, 26 December 2007 (UTC)
3. Oppose It's hard to see my daily contribution/cleanup of the Volapük Wikipedia neglected by those who state there is only one contributor: Smeira. This Wikipedia has fought to increase its quality in the past month. The depth indicator has raised 2 points in that period already. The comparison with the Lombard Wikipedia is not valid because AFAIK the main reason for deletion of articles in that wiki relates to the supposed invented dialect of Lombard used by the previous admin and not because they were bot-generated (a bot's a problem? If I copy/paste 100,000 articles contents, is it ok then?). I strongly oppose this request. Malafaya 11:23, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

   You don't get the point:

   1. Copy & pasting would be evil as well. In contrast it would be very cool if you'd translate 100'000 articles to Volapük by yourself. Arnomane 11:48, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

      I don't see why. If I had done those articles by translating them manually -- they're so easy that the work, although certainly harder without bots, would not be beyond the reach of a number of human contributors -- they would all still be short, 5-sentence stubs. In what way would this have made them any better? A point to ponder: articles should be judged by their quality, not by whether or not they are bot-created. --Smeira 12:04, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

   2. The Lombard Wikipedia had this bot article problem among others. Arnomane 11:48, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

      I did get the point: you just can't count how many copy/paste actions have been made in any Wikipedia. Therefore you just act on those where you can see bots, which on their own are not evil (or else let's just ban bots altogether). After talking to the current Lombard sysop some time ago, he explained that the article deletion is just related to the invented language. It's less costly to rewrite them. Malafaya 11:55, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

   Another point: in suggesting that bot articles be removed, you're bypassing the opinion of the people involved: those who contribute to vo.wp. Please consider discussing your proposal and your arguments there beforehand! --Smeira 12:02, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

4. Oppose All reasons mentioned in the proposal have been discussed and answered in the previous proposal for closing vo.wp. If the proposer wants admin rights, s/he should request them at vo.wp (e.g. at vo:Vükiped:Kafetar, and s/he should discuss his/her intentions for vo.wp with the other contributors. Otherwise this is the wiki equivalent of a coup d'état. --Smeira 12:08, 26 December 2007 (UTC)
5. OpposeThis isn't going to work, instead of making you admin or anything else, you should expand those bot articles. 82.174.63.90 12:58, 26 December 2007 (UTC)
   (= me Kameraad Pjotr 12:59, 26 December 2007 (UTC))
6. Oppose. My home wiki is a smallish Wikipedia with a much larger neighbour Wikipedia. Many of the articles on nn.wikipedia are much smaller, more stubbish, than those on no.wikipedia, and there is a lot more users on no.wikipedia than there is on nn.wikipedia. Close to everyone that can read nn.wikipedia can read no.wikipedia too. Needless to say some people feel nn.wikipedia are just a waste of time and space. If Arnomane can get to be sysop on vo.wikipedia through this process, anyone/any mob can get to erase small wikis, and override the local small communities. That will make it impossible for me to continue using, and working on, Wikimedia projects. --Jorunn 16:26, 26 December 2007 (UTC)
7. Oppose Balko 18:02, 26 December 2007 (UTC) - This request is far from fair and balanced. The Volapük wiki does no harm.
8. Strong oppose The small Volapuk Wikipedia community is the only one that have permission to judge about your own content. This isn't a Wikimedia issue. This proposal is a pure nonsense. 555 21:14, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

   Well would you mind loosing the Volapük Interwiki? Would you mind being ignored and silenced by every other Wikipedia? I hope not and I do hope you now get the point that sometimes you have to listen to the others or you risk loosing all sovereignty over your wiki. Arnomane 22:35, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

   The result on Proposals for closing projects/Closure of Volapük Wikipedia was keep, no vo.wikipedia is a bastard due to theirs bot-generated articles. You are misunderstanding a request to close with a request to get ride of bot generated articles. Bot generated articles on vo.wp are exactly the same thing as a bot generated articles everywhere. If you have troubles with these, you may have with all, so... Why not requesting to deleted all bot generated articles from all wikis?

   I don't have nightmares with a bot uploading text on a wiki. This don't generates any troubles with me. Simply it. 555 23:56, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

   Arnomane: I don't think vo.wp is risking being "ignored and silenced by every other Wikipedia". There were many messages in support of vo.wp from other Wikipedias. Look at fr.wp: there are many more stubs on French communes in vo.wp than on German Gemeinde, still I only had support and good ideas from fr.wp people. Aren't you confusing your own private opinion with "every other Wikipedia"'s? -- Smeira 01:47, 28 dec 2007.

9. Strongly opposed to this proposal. Hégésippe | ±Θ± 00:30, 27 December 2007 (UTC) + Commentaires en français : les admins de MetaWiki devraient donner un avertissement sérieux à ceux qui, n'étant pas parvenus à obtenir la fermeture du wiki en volapük, cherchent un nouvel angle d'attaque, particulièrement sournois, et tout aussi injustifié (et injustifiable). Hégésippe | ±Θ± 00:30, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

   Could anyone translate this please? Chaddy 04:43, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

   Sure, Chaddy! Here it goes: (Hégésippe, s'il te plaît, vérifie ma traduction; on ne sait jamais...)
   

   The admins at MetaWiki should really give a serious warning to those who, not having been able to obtain the closure of the Volapük wiki, now try a new "attack angle" -- a particularly sneaky one, and equally unjustified.

   --Smeira 00:49, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

   Thanks. Chaddy 23:42, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

10. Strongly opposed. It's paranoya. Let be Volapuk Wikipedia. Project Wikipedia isn't Olympic Games. No problems for number of articles. --Pauk 05:33, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

    Just a note: this opinion was added after this request to come and vote here; same with the opinion below ∴ Alex Smotrov 06:05, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

    Just a note: asking people who care about the issue to vote is normal practice. In real-world elections, we all get reminded by mail and on TV of how important it is to vote and participate in the decision process. --Smeira 22:31, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

    Arnomane has also invited his friends from de.wikipedia 555 01:42, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

    And I have also invited people from fr, it and es to come and vote for the choice they deem most appropiate] Leptictidium 13:57, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

11. Strongly opposed. Generated articles we can find in different wikis. Why we should delete all of them only from Volapük wiki? Only the Community of the vo.wp can make a desision to delete or to keep their articles. ОйЛ (OiL) 05:50, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
12. Oppose Let the Volapük Wikipedia be what it is: A beautiful project in a beautiful language! --HannesM 07:02, 27 December 2007
13. Extremely strongly oppose. What is it with the Germans and their we want to delete everything mentality anyway? Waerth 10:00, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

    Nobody learn a langauage by a database. A language is learning by writing, spoking and reading. Volapük-Wikipedia is a sinless rpoject, written by a brainless bot. — The preceding unsigned comment was added by Liesel (talk) 10:33, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

    I'm glad you think Volapük is sinless (have you looked up the meaning of this word? sinless = sündenfrei, sündenlos :-)... But seriously now, you're talking as if this were a closure proposal again (which, as MF-Warburg and Slomox demonstrate below, it probably is...) And who is saying anything about learning a language? Why is this important? (Short "database-like" texts are, by the way, wonderful for beginners. If you ever want to learn, say, Albanian, I recommend trying to read the stubs at sh.wp first; the featured articles are too difficult. I know what I'm saying, I've been trying to study Albanian for a few months now.) --Smeira 22:54, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

14. Oppose Closing didnt make it, now you attack this wikipedia this way? Just leave this wiki alone. Multichill 12:46, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
15. Oppose the general nature of this request. The Volapük-Wikipedia needs to work things out for themselves. Can't everyone see that imposing deletions against community consensus is going to destroy this community? How are they supposed to develop policies, procedures, etc. when people are stepping in declaring their decisions wrong and overturning them? This is overall a very bad proposal for addressing a community that is doing something outsiders don't like. Do we need to start making a list of all the local policies that need to be "corrected"?--BirgitteSB 15:09, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

    vo-WP doesn´t have a community. Or are a handful users and some bots newly a community? Chaddy 16:20, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

    Yes, it does; check the meaning of en:Community: a group of organisms (e.g. people) sharing a space and common interests, beliefs, etc -- no upper or lower limits on number. You're even trying to become a member of it yourself, or else I don't understand your request to have your account there de-blocked. Why don't you propose your policies there? (see vo:Vükiped:Kafetar for such requests). Notice also that you're straying from the discussion: you're discussing the viability of Volapük as a language for an encyclopedia, not the number of stubs, which supposedly is the rationale for this proposal. --Smeira 17:14, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

    Chaddy, as you can easily verify, there are lots of Wikipedias that have 1 or 2 users (in some, hardly none) and yet nobody is trying to shut them down for "not being a community". Malafaya 17:50, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

    @Chaddy: If there is no community then it should be closed entirely. If there is enough of a community to prevent closure then that community needs to work it out. I can't believe that people wish to spend their time policing wikis they do not belong to for bot-generated articles. Seriously, I would understand if you were cracking down on copyright violations or non-neutral articles or improper restrictions on editing. I would still oppose the exact nature of this proposal, but I would be much more sympathetic. It is almost laughable (if it wasn't so serious) that so many people wish to cross the line of wiki-automony over bot-generated articles. --BirgitteSB 20:22, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

16. Oppose I would be opposed to such a draconian measure against VO, unless it applied fairly to all Wikipedias. Take for instance, the Polish wikipedia with 450000 articles and a pathetic depth of 7. Would you suggest that we insert a non-Polish admin into the the Polish Wikipedia to delete soulless robot garbage, or to put it in the incubator? Crazy! That being said, I think the Volapukists should establish some guidelines about "what is an article" and try to stick to it. For example, at the Esperanto wikipedia, we say an article must have at least three complete sentences and one internal link. That way, if someone points out a subminimum article (like vo:Mäzul, vo:1 Decembrie, etc.) it can either be improved or deleted. Also, there should be notability standards: Not every human on the planet deserves a wiki article, and nor does every village of 50 people. Creation by robot shouldn't matter as much as general quality and notability. It should be fairly obvious when something is below the minimum standard. Volapukists, please establish minimum standards for quality (length) and notability!!!! -- Yekrats 18:16, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

    It's curious you mention Polish Wiki too. I was deemed off-topic for mentioning it before. Yekrats, thanks for the suggestion. Actually we were working on that (standardizing & improving articles) when suddenly we had to put our efforts on this discussion rather than working on those articles. Malafaya 18:28, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

    Quote of myself: I think this is a fair and balanced request, which should be adapted to similar cases in future if it works out. This was written with other Wikipedias in mind (and I did think about ploish) but you cnnot honestly demand to do everything at once. This has nothing to do with injustice, just with limited ressources and working carefully (in order to minimize failures during the procedure). So plish wikipedia is off-topic now. Arnomane 18:51, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

    First: "Fair and balanced" is probably not the phrase you want to use, because en:Fox News Channel often uses it, and they are known for neither being fair nor balanced. ;-) That aside, are we focusing on the problems of Wikipedias in general, or specifically picking on Volapuk? It seems like you are doing an end-run around the deletion vote, trying to move it to the incubator and force deletions from outside. Personally, I would like to see them delete a lot of garbage there. I made that pretty clear during the vote for deletion. I think many of those robot articles are an embarrassing blight, and probably should be deleted. And probably the Volapuk community should be more proactive to deleting that kind of junk. Furthermore, the Volapuk community should be less quick to judge requests for deletion -- like Chaddy's above, who proposed articles for deletion, but the Volapukists saw such a request as vandalism. Clearly Chaddy pointing out the substandard nature of the articles spurred Smeira to fix it, even if neither party was very friendly about it. -- Yekrats 20:44, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

    As Malafaya mentions, we're trying to do that, Yekrats. Even though nobody at vo.wp still staid anything against these articles, I think it's a good idea to foster discussion; so I have right now started a discussion heading on bot articles at vo.wp (see vo:Vükiped:Kafetar#Geb elas bots ad jafön yegedis nulik). Now, Yekrats, I of course respect your right to decide for yourself what is "garbage" or "junk" and what is not; but in the absence of clear guidelines, please respect other people's right to think differently. The Germans, for instance, if I remember well their guidelines, say that any inhabited settlement is sufficiently notable. As for the Chaddy case: I fully agree. It's better to ignore provocations and assume good intentions. The amount of aggressive vandalism we had to deal with made me forget that. --Smeira 23:08, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

    Arnomane, nobody is saying you should have done the Polish wikipedia first (though it has more bot-created articles than vo.wp, and would probably set a much stronger precendent; but you decide what you do). But there are two points you're missing: (a) this proposal should be discussed within vo.wp first, and here only if this fails; you haven't even tried to do that, you jumped ahead and landed here first; (b) despite basing the proposal on other "problems" (which have other solutions that you don't want to discuss), you have already admitted (down below in one of the comments section) that the real problem is: you don't like many bot-created stubs. You haven't said why, you just keep repeating words like "crap" or "should never be done" -- as if everybody agreed with you. Obviously many people don't. And people from other small projects may well be afraid that you or others like you will go on to impose your view on what's an article/stub and what's not an article/stub to their wikis. Before you do that, you should initiate a broader discussion on when small articles or stubs should be immediately deleted. If there is no cross-wiki consensus, you're just imposing your opinions. I don't agree with you, and I'm not necessarily wrong. If the problem is larger, then you shouldn't start by attacking vo.wp; you should start by saying what criteria you use and why they are better than other people's criteria. (Why is vo:Febul bad but de:O'Fallon (Illinois) good? Why isn't Chaddy tagging de:O'Fallon (Illinois) for deletion?) Am I making this point clear, or am I being "cloudy" and using "long words" again? --Smeira 23:08, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

    When I tagged vo:Febul, this page had been almost empty. There were only links to the other articles abouts months and a calendar. But there was no text. You can´t affirm that an empty page with no content is an article.Chaddy 23:35, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

    But I don't affirm that. What I do affirm is: you didn't ask anybody at vo.wp what the right procedure is for dealing with such cases. There is a category (vo:Klad:Pads koräkabik = pages to correct) where such pages should be included for further improvement. You didn't know that, and you didn't ask. (If you looked at the history page, you'll have seen that the page was created long before I came to vo.wp, and by a human; I hadn't really seen it before. I hope you're not blaming me for it.) Note that I added some text, and placed it (or rather the entire vo:Klad:Muls, to which it belongs) in the vo:Klad:Yegeds no pefipenöls: articles to improve/complete. Please look around and ask for advice before doing something like requesting deletion in a wiki you have no previous experience with. This is what I was asked to do every time I opened an account in a new wiki. --Smeira 00:59, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

    Good idea. I just wanted to suggest it. Polish Wikipedia certainly needs cleanup and I think I can afford that task. I am going to file the same request for Polish Wikipedia.--Certh 01:54, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

    Go ahead, let's see what happens. Maybe someone will ask for the closure of the Dutch Wikipedia too, since they have tens of thousands of bot-created city stubs (e.g.: nl:Buchères). Hmm... you'll probably be opposed by the same people who opposed the first vo.wp closure proposal and this second one (per Slomox, this proposal is equivalent to a second closure proposal). Are you sure you wouldn't want to start a discussion about bot-generated stubs and whether or not they are evil first? Meta is a good place for that too. (Also, it seems you don't have a userpage at Meta yet -- I think you have to have one, with a link to your home wiki, in order to participate or to propose closures or "radical cleanups"). --Smeira 11:42, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

    You cannot excuse your own mistakes with the mistakes of others. You cannot say: "Cause others did write 30% of their Wikipedia with a bot I have the right to write 100% of my Wikipedia with a bot". At some point there is the last straw and this here definitely is. Arnomane 11:49, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

    Arnomane, I am not excusing my "mistakes" with the "mistakes" of others. I am saying that I don't think this is a mistake -- at least not as bad as you think it is. You say writing many bot-created articles (say, 95% of the titles) is bad; but you don't say why. Once more, I challenge this idea. By doing this, I managed (a) to find new contributors (the community has grown from one to about five, and new users keep coming), (b) to openly demonstrate that article count is not a good measure for quality (see the discussion of the first closure proposal), and (c) to get a lot of -- true, correct, and relevant --information into Volapük that had never been available in this language before. Of course I agree that if these articles were improved by people, they would become much better. I have improved many of them, and other people are now doing this too. Yet I don't think even the "unimproved" ones are per se so bad as to justify your anger. You say this is the "last straw" (I suppose you mean "where you draw the line"; note that "last straw" has more to do with anger than with good reasons); can you explain why? Look: the articles that are your "last straw" satisfy the definition of a useful stub -- check it! And if these stubs are useful, why many of them (yes, even 95% of the titles) are so bad? The absolute number of stubs is not so high: there are more bot-created stubs outside of vo.wp than in vo.wp. And above all: why not discuss this within vo.wp first? Why violate wiki-autonomy over this, when (as BirgitteSB said) there are much more important problems to solve first? If you have a problem with stubs, then, before attacking the work of those who don't agree with you, please demonstrate that it is really bad. This can be done by starting a general discussion and inviting comments from all Wikipedias with bot-created articles. --Smeira 13:08, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

    Note: If this request was less draconian, I might support it. For example, if the request forced VO to delete SmeiraBot's additions with less than X number of bytes (250?), or add more useful content. I think many of the articles there now are not only un-useful, they are an embarrassment to Wikipedia in general; furthermore they put a vitriolic eye of scrutiny on planned languages. I am an admin at the Esperanto-wiki, where we are working very hard to make a high-quality and respectable wiki. Whenever these propositions about the Volapuk wiki come up, I wince. I know that inevitably people will question whether Wikis are justified in planned languages, and they use the poor quality and large number of articles at VO:WP (perhaps unfairly or unwisely) as the justification for that. So, although I am once again pensively supporting VO:WP, at the same time I am not condoning the large bot-loading of articles to advertise, and urging the VO:WP to clean up its own act. I'd like it to be done in-house (in VO:WP) and I'd like for it to be done more quickly than Smeira's 2-year proposal. If you do not, I fear we will be fighting this battle over and over again. -- Yekrats 18:36, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

    Yekrats, that would be a good suggestion, but I checked articles smaller than 250 bytes and, based on the Shortpages special page, I estimate around 6000 articles, and many of them seem to be disambiguation pages (not even fair to delete these). It wouldn't make a noticeable difference in the project nor it would fit I think the goals of the supporters of this voting. Believe me: it's not that easy to find a bot-generated stub in Volapük Wikipedia that you can delete on that criteria. And deleting articles with less than 2000 bytes is already asking too much, isn't it? Many articles in these conditions exist throughout Wikimedia projects and nobody is acting on them with speedy-deletions. Malafaya 18:52, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

    The number 250 wasn't any fixed idea. I was just picking a number out of the air; naturally you wouldn't want to delete disambiguation pages nor the framework of Wikipedia. To be more specific, I'm talking about the 1 or 2 sentence articles which are all created by robot with very little content. I have deleted uncountable many of that kind of article out the Esperanto Wikipedia for exactly those reasons -- too small, too stumpy; extremely small stumps are (arguably) unhelpful. Generally, we feel someone should improve an article or delete it, and we give time for someone to improve it first. I'm talking about the thousands of articles that are two sentences: "Xxxxx is a city in Yyyyyy. It has Zzzzzz people living there." I wouldn't recommend speedy deletion on anything but patent nonsense or vandalism. On an unrelated note, I don't see why you were linking to the Esperanto Wikipedia in the paragraph above. Here I am: I try to support the VO:WP, against my better judgment, and yet I think you are moking me and my Wikipedia, which has thousands more useful articles than VO. Yet, there are still many of that kind of article still at EO:WP, so my crusade against useless crap continues. Maybe you were trying to make a point, but made it in a rude way. I'm not sure. However, you are making me reconsider my "oppose" vote. }:-( -- Yekrats 21:19, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

    Yekrats, not at all. I'm sorry if it looked like mocking: I just wanted to give examples you would feel comfortable evaluating, sincerely, so I picked them from your own Wiki like I could have picked in any other. I think those articles are perfectly fine as they are, no second intentions implied. I'm too a contributor of Vikipedio and would never mock of it. Sorry for the ambiguous linking. Malafaya 22:18, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

17. Oppose Another farce from wikipedians with too long of a nose to comfortably stick to their own projects. Vükiped has so many bad articless ― who cares!!! It's their language and their project, let them be the ones ashamed for the alleged lack of quality. I wonder why such suggestions keep coming from de wikipedians, is there some hidden profanity in volapuk the non-german speakers don't get?! That said, I do think meta users who don't have direct links to their user pages in their home projects should be banned from meta, especially if they are jumping over their heads to bring radical changes to other projects. ― Teak 18:46, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

    I do care I care about the Volapük interwiki link crap flooding our other Wikipedias and the bad reputation we other Wikipedias get from this dirty kid. Arnomane 18:51, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

    Would you please, please provide at least one link to some page in which it can be seen that interwiki links to stubs are "crap" (most interwiki links to stubs are not to vo.wp) -- who ever said that? And why? Or to a page in which this "bad reputation" is documented -- other than you people's talk pages? Don't you think your words, your behavior and your obvious anger are more "crappy" and typical of a "dirty kid" than anything in vo.wp? Arnomane, your proposal was so well written, so carefully worded... why can't you go on speaking like that? --Smeira 22:19, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

    Because:

    • Inmediatly after my initial request (I did think quite a while about it and did read al lot of older discussions beforehand) you started to occupy this proposal with a huge flood of your comments in lenghty redundant words (you obviously just wanted to have the most words).
    • You never ever acknowledged any problems from your side, you just hide yourself behind your general comments on minorities on your souvereignty and so on.
    • Supporters of you do the same and do mass comments (isn't it strange that others do say I want the last word in every comment but do exactly that themselves in contrast to me?) in order to make a kind of denial of service to this very proposal.

    This sum makes me just sad and thus I have doubts on your honest intentions. Arnomane 00:41, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

    Arnomane, if the "supporters" is me, it's not a coincidence that I have the "last word" if you make me a direct question. Play fair and not with words. Malafaya 00:45, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

    Well, Arnomane,

    • The space I "occupy" is free for discussion; anyone can use it. I explain my points, I give arguments, I provide links, I express ideas, I ask questions. How exactly is this bad? Everything I wrote is relevant to the "problems" you mentioned in the proposal. Can you show anything I wrote that is not relevant? The space for voting is clear and free; have my explanations made voting here any more difficult? Has anyone felt threatened by me? Have I attacked without arguments, have I provided wrong information, have I used impolite words? You, on the other hand, have used impolite words ("crap"), have put words into other people's mouth ("you Volapük people ask for more time" when nobody here asked for more time so far), have made claims without a clear basis ("you'll loose the Volapük interwiki" -- to de.wp maybe, if you have consensus there; but elsewhere? why? what's your basis for saying this?), and you fail to answer direct questions (like: why are bot stubs worse than human stubs? how can you solve the technical problems with the incubator that Warburg mentions? why are interwiki links to stubs bad? etc. etc. etc.)
    • If there is a problem in discussion here, I still don't see it. As Pauk said, Wikipedia is no Olympic Games: article number doesn't matter for quality. I keep asking you why you think bot-created articles are bad, and why interwiki links to stubs are bad, and you simply don't answer, you just keep repeating "yes it is, it is, it is"! This is not my fault.
    • I explained everything I said. I had many arguments, so I needed to expand them. And you keep not answering, so I have to repeat them again and again. How exaclty explaining my opinion makes the discussion worse? The space for voting is clear and free; my clear expositions of my points are not jeopardizing that in any way. I don't know about you wanting the last word; what I see is: you keep not answering.

    I don't think you have a reason for getting so angry, Arnomane. I'm not trying to attack you; I'm merely trying to get you to defend your ideas. I don't agree with them (and I'm not the only one, as you can see in the "Oppose" section), and the "huge flow of words" says why. Read it, don't be afraid. Then, please, answer. It's much better than getting angry. --Smeira 01:53, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

18. Strong oppose Since when is Wikipedia about deleting information? BoH 19:31, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
19. Oppose as proposal is nonsense. Generated articles are more then valid (please, add sources in all articles!). I may see that one or combination of the next may be the reasons for demanding such nonsense action: (1) someone is afraid with so much articles, (2) someone doesn't like to see that a small community is able to make the same number of articles as big ones, (3) someone is preparing field for removing all bot-generated articles and forbidding such actions. In all cases, please go firstly to the English, French, Italian and Polish Wikipedias. --Millosh 20:40, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

    Hi Millosh! Thanks for your comment. Perhaps you'd like to join the Association Of Those Who Think Bot-Created Stubs Are An Acceptable Way To Add Information To A Wikipedia? Since the 'support' people apparently aren't going to do it, we probably should think about a way to start a general discussion on bot-created stubs at a higher level. --Smeira 10:38, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

20. Strong oppose And I do find statements like crap, dirty kid,... quite disconcerting and strongly resent such insults! --Manie 22:44, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
21. Oppose Sopho 00:17, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
22. I Oppose this nonsense. ----Anonymous Dissident^Talk 00:52, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
23. I oppose this proposal even if I can understand the problem for Wikimedia to show as a big project a site mainly created by bots. I'm sure we can found a better solution than delete any article. Aoineko 02:36, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
24. Oppose as proposal is nonsense. See further above. Sonuwe 02:43, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
25. Oppose this is a threat. Where to stop? This is a communities decision and nobodys else. + Per Birgitte SB on foundation-I. --birdy geimfyglið _(:> )=| 12:47, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
26. changed to Oppose - It seems more likely that a better solution can be found without actually deleting everything..and Insults and threats is not the way to do it !!!..--Cometstyles 12:59, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
27. Bot-created articles on towns are great and should be created in every Wikipedia for all towns in the world - why do manually what you can do automatically? Ausir 13:21, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

    That's exactly my point (but I like more the idea of central database accessible to every project, something like Commons). I wonder why all the supporters of this proposal fail to see that? (And why they miss the fact that the vo.wp community is the one to decide what to do with their project)... --Smeira 13:42, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

28. Contra - again. --MF-Warburg 14:26, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
29. Oppose 91.77.182.144 15:15, 28 December 2007 (UTC). Dr. Fatman
30. Oppose I would propose to make the interwiki botmasters not link to vo.wp any more since vo articles do not meet the quality standard most other projects underlie, but the quality of their articles itself is not our matter, it's a community decision. (Nevertheless, I don't like bot generated stuff at all, but in smaller languages it's better to have such stuff than nothing.) --Thogo (talk) 17:50, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
    • "Quality standard" which doesn't deal with NPOV and references is a cultural bias. Imposing one cultural bias may lead to imposing other... --Millosh 18:28, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
31. Oppose I don't see anything in the reasons for this proposal that wasn't countered in the vote for closure. The interwiki disruption has already happened - surely as much disruption would be cause by suddenly removing all those interwiki links again! I can't understand the logic here. The other arguments are general arguments that should apply to all Wikipedias - if stubs are bad, remove them from all WPs. If bot edits are bad, remove them from all WPs. If WPs for languages with few speakers are bad, close all WPs for languages with few speakers. If WPs with small (but active) communities are bad, close all WPs with small (but active) communities. If edit count is a bad measure of size then use something better! Also, Lombard does not set a precedent here - the situation was quite different (as has already been covered on this page). --HappyDog 19:52, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

    Hi HappyDog! Perhaps you'd care to join the Association Of Those Who Think Bot-Created Stubs Are An Acceptable Way To Add Information To A Wikipedia? Since the 'support' people apparently aren't going to do it, we probably should think about a way to start a general discussion on bot-created stubs at a higher level. --Smeira 10:38, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

32. Oppose nonsense Mateus Hidalgo 20:24, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
33. Strong oppose - silly meddling, and terrible insults. I recently "translated" vo:Kosmopolan to en:Kosmopolan so there is definitely some useful pages being created on this sub-domain that do not exist on any other sub-domain. Its worth noting that oldwikisource:Category:Volapük is also very healthy.
    If interwiki links are the problem, simply request that iw links are not created to bot generated vo pages until they have been reviewed by a human. John Vandenberg 12:57, 29 December 2007 (UTC)
34. Oppose Robert, a contributer to the Volapük wiki, and proud of it!— The preceding unsigned comment was added by 172.203.125.239 (talk) 555 14:26, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

    Glidis, o Robert! Ad givön vögodi olik is, mutol i labön kali su Meta; jafolös, begö! bali. (Su kal at, pladolös i yümi ad pad olik su Vükiped cifik ola -- Vükiped Volapükik cedü ob -- dat valans ökanons sevön, das ya äbinol geban Vükipeda bü mob at, e das labol gitäti ad vögodön. Danö! --Smeira 03:10, 30 December 2007 (UTC) Hi Robert! To vote here, you need to have a Meta account; please create one. (On this account, please put also a link to your home page on your main Wikipedia -- the Volapük one I think -- so that everybody can see that you were a Wikipedia user before this proposal and that you have the right to vote. Thanks!

    Here's my user page for the meta wiki [[3]] which contains a link to my user page at Vüki. Does this count as a vote?Robertvp 16:31, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

35. OpposeChabi 10:35, 30 December 2007 (UTC)
36. Oppose because project makas impossible that language extinct. --Mihael Simonic 21:22, 30 December 2007 (UTC)
37. Strong oppose This is unfair and unnecessary at all. Numerous Wikipedia language editions such as Pali (zero native contributors), Bihari (zero native contributors), Oriya (zero native contributors), Newari, Tarantino, Arpitan...etc. are also comprised mainly from bot-generated stubs. Besides, a few months ago, User:K. Kellogg-Smith attempted to delete all the stubs on Tok Pisin Wikipedia. In the end, the stubs were restored back and User:Drini told that former sysop: "Stubs are NOT Vandalism and are Not garbage". [4]. --Jose77 22:19, 30 December 2007 (UTC)
38. Oppose Osias 03:28, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

    This vote shouldn't count. It's an anonymous user whose only contribution on meta is this vote. -- Leptictidium 03:21, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

    True. Anonymous user, please login and sign your vote. Thanks, Malafaya 03:23, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

39. Oppose Stay away from vo.wp! -Markvondeegel 16:15, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

    That´s the best argument I have ever heard... By the way, what do you mean? Should nobody contribute to vo-WP or what? Chaddy 17:00, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

40. Oppose I oppose this proposal, being invalid, since it goes against established practices and even the foundation issues. Arnomane, if you want the sysop flag, go request it properly at the proper place. - Hillgentleman 17:34, 31 December 2007 (UTC)
41. Oppose To stop massive article creation by bots, system-wide guidelines to limit it should be developed. I would support such guidelines applied to all wikipedias, but I oppose haphazard limitations applied to certain "unpopular" wikipedias. --Jmb 21:07, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

Comments

General comments

For all people who say this should be done, because Volapük costs too much money. Ever heard of restore a deleted page? Every edit will still be kept and would still cost money even though you delete all pages. --OosWesThoesBes 11:02, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

It is not a matter of money (who did say that?) but that it harms Wikimedia project appearance. See Meta:Babel, where I introduced a Japanese coverage - it reported this dispute, reaction from other communities including esperanto and called Volapuk Wikipedia what doesn't deserve the name of encyclopedia. Placing it as one of "our major projects" harm our reputation in my opinion. --Aphaia 11:18, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

In that case we've got a different opinion, lucky for me there's right of saying. 1. It's a useful project. 2. Enough contributors and contributions. 3. It has got pages, which are, in my eyes, no stubs. 4. Then don't place it under "our major projects" but under "our special projects" --OosWesThoesBes 11:25, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

(Reply to Aphaia)Easy: simply stop calling it "one of the major projects" (review the criteria?). I believe nobody at Volapük wanted to be one of the majors at this point anyway. Malafaya 11:26, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

No, Malafaya, See the Babel discussion. Smeira opposes to remove it from the portal as one of 100K+ project. That is the major reason for me to support this clean up. If he struggles to keep it as "100K+ project" to claim of the rank of major projects, so our next move should remove this attempt for creating a fake appearance, I think. --Aphaia 11:32, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

Aphaia, I read "diagonally", I couldn't find Smeira's reluctance but I believe you. What portal is referred there? The www.wikipedia.org page already doesn't link to Volapük Wikipedia. Malafaya 11:42, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing it out. I agree on that it was removed from the top section. But it is still on the 100K+ raw. So I think I have a good reason to retain my position still. Whether if Smeira is reluctant or not is perhaps our difference of way of taking his words. His position about removal looks me - as the above also - reluctant. Did he call it "cheat"? But there may be another way of interpretation. --Aphaia 11:55, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

I am indeed reluctant, Aphaia. Let me point out that the discussion at Meta:Babel came to the conclusion that it would be better to use other criteria (like the List of Wikipedias by sample of articles) rather than deleting articles. The 100K+ article line is not a good propaganda measure for Wikipedia: it's easy to attack it as "propaganda" in the bad sense of the word -- it doesn't measure what it seems to be measuring. It looks to me as though all kinds of wrong reasons and half truths lurk behind this request. As I said there: use other criteria, create another page listing wikipedias by this better criterion, mention the reasons why you did this (by saying why the new criterion is better than simple article count), and then change your "publicity" pages to reflect that. In the end, that's a net improvement: people will see that the WF is improving their quality measurement, and that's positive PR. In the end, everybody wins. --Smeira 12:18, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

If it's to be removed from the List of Wikipedias, in that case, I would also oppose. It's a plain list of Wikipedias with basic statistics. Removing Volapük from this list is simply tampering with a list of projects (Volapük Wikipedia does not exist?). It's not our fault that your "biggest/best Wikipedias" criteria is based on a single article count from this list. Malafaya 01:03, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

BTW, anyone willing to delete contents on the Polish Wikipedia on this reasoning too? I clicked on Random Page 4 times. The 4 times I got a stub on some city, all articles looked the same. Polish Wiki has a depth of 7, not much higher that Volapük... Just check the Polish interwikis on minor towns worldwide... Come on guys. Are you sure it's not just prejudice against the Volapük language? Malafaya 11:35, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

Please do not change the subject. I pointed out a bad coverage about the project - not only Volapuk but Wikimedia project as a whole. Can you please point out a similar coverage about Polish Wikipedia? If so, we would like the Polish Wikipedia community to improve it - as for Volapuk it has no community, and not responded the bad reputation effectively. That is why we need to take an action. --Aphaia 11:39, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

Please actually read my request. You will be surprised to recognize that I even did think about the polish wikipedia. Quote of myself:

In contrast to every other Wikipedia that used bot generated articles to a larger extent, almost 100% of Volapük Wikipedia content (page numbers and bytes) were generated by a bot [...]

[...] which should be adapted to similar cases in future if it works out.

Wether there is need for action in other Wikipedias is not on the table right now. Volapük Wikipedia has gone simply too far and if others did the same mistake, maybe this thing can be turned into a more general rule after it worked in Volapük. Arnomane 11:45, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

Aphaia: well, I'm sorry for only now jumping in but only now I found out there is a discussion about this subject. Truth is the Volapük Wikipedia has increased its quality greatly in the past month but nobody here wants to measure that. Of course, dealing with 100K articles is not easy but it will get to the desired point where quality is good overall.

Arnomane: that's what I mean: bot. The articles I saw were created by some user tsca.bot: 4 out of 4. I'm not saying here that anything should be done about Polish just like I don't think anything should be done about Volapük other than warning. Work is currently being done to increase the quality. Article count has been quite stable for more than a month and work has been redirected to improve the existing contents. Malafaya 11:50, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

What do you call elusive? All Wikipedias create articles with bots. All Wikipedias have stubs. Some have more than others in any of these categories. There is no rule on this and maybe that is what is actually missing. By proposing massive deletion or closure of a single Wikipedia for reasons that apply to any Wikipedia to a lesser or greater degree, you're applying a subjective criterion and most of all your request will probably be interpreted as discriminating. I pointed out Polish as one with a big ratio of both just like Volapük. And I sincerely would like to know if those Polish interwikis in, for instance, American towns, are less rubbish to you than Volapük ones. Malafaya 12:12, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

You give elusive answers. Simply look at the raw numbers and you will see that elusive answers and weak comparisons (ala "others also did bad things") are not approriate here. Arnomane 11:56, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

Aromane: You're the one using elusive answers. The numbers are what they are: lots of bot-created stubs at vo.wp. But the point is that you think this is a "problem", because bot-created stubs are "bad". I challenge that assumption: please show that this is so. If bot-created articles are not necessarily bad, there is no problem with the number of articles they created -- unless we again fall into the statistical misuse of article count as a measure of quality or good work. --Smeira 12:25, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

Aphaia: in addition to Malafaya's point (that the quality has been increasing steadily at vo.wp, a point nobody wants to look at), I'll say, as I said there: I saw better coverage elsewhere (in fact, there's a TV program here in the Netherlands who wants to do a little 2-minute report on Volapük because of the Vükiped -- wouldn't it be bad coverage if they had to report that non-Volapük users forced Volapük users to delete articles?...). And "good coverage" doesn't seem to me like a good reason. If you change the criteria and improve the quality measurements, you get rid of the "Volapük problem" (just see the List of Wikipedias by sample of articles) and you can tell everybody that the new criteria are better -- "we're not simply using article count anymore, we're using more intelligent criteria". Think of the publicity value of this claim. --Smeira 12:32, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

Ich stimmte für eine radikale Durcharbeitung der Volapük'schen Wikipedia, weil es dort eine vielzahl von miserabeln Artikeln gibt (beispielsweise alle Artikel über Monate, siehe vo:Febul) und weil es dort keine Qualitätssicherung gibt. Ich weiss nicht, wie viele Benutzer dort aktiv sind und sich engagieren, die Artikel besser zu machen. Und so verrotten einige Artikel und bleiben Monate lang unbearbeitet. Einige von euch sagten, die Volapük Wikipedia sei gut als eine Quelle, gar als eine Metapedia, wo man Zahlen und Informationen über alles findet. Die meisten Daten dort sind aber meistens von einer anderen Wikipedia entnommen worden. Eine Metapedia zu haben ist eine perfekte Idee, aber dann bitte nicht für jeden Artikel oder jedes chemische Element einen Artikel erstellen und denken, man sei eine Enzyklopädie.--Petar Marjanovic 12:12, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

Some of you said, that the Volapük Wikipedia is good as source, as a Metapedia, where you can find figures and information about everything. But most of the datas there are often tooken from an other Wikipedia. Having a Metapedia is good, it's a very good idea. But every village, every chemical element should not have an own article.--Petar Marjanovic 12:12, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

Lieber Petar, Stubs sind nicht unbedingt ein guter Grund, um "radikale Durcharbeitung" zu wollen (schau mal de:O'Fallon (Illinois): darf ich vielleicht de.wp-Admin werden, um solche "miserable Stubs" aus de.wp wegzulöschen?) Ich unterstütze auch die Idee einer "Metapedia". Das hat aber mit der Idee, Volapük-Stubs zu löschen, nichts zu tun.

Dear Petar, stubs are not necessarily a reason to want a "radical reworking" of a Wikipedia (look at de:O'Fallon (Illinois): should I request admin rights at de.wp to go delete such "miserable stubs"?) I also support the idea of a "Metapedia". But this has nothing to do with the idea of deleting Volapük stubs. Smeira 01:55, 28 december 2007.

This summary here confirms what I was saying above about discrimination. This voting induces people that are just haters of something (in this particular case, Volapük, or even minority languages in general). I wonder how many of the above supporters are actually supporting this specific case of Volapük Wikipedia or because they hate Volapük or minority languages and therefore should not be taken serioulsy... What people are allowed to vote here? Just about anyone? This is not an election, this is about other people's work, other people's will to improve a project. What legitimacy exists for just anybody come here and cast his/her vote at random or holding a grudge? I would seriously accept a voting initiated by the WMF itself, with serious voters but this voting just seems ridiculous as it is. "Just come in and cast your stone at the sinner", it seems. I'll abstain from further comments here as right now I can't see any seriousness or legitimacy in any result that comes from this voting. Malafaya 17:02, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

I am not a hater of Volapük, quite the contrary. Can you please differentiate between me (the one that started this request) and someone else? I am just upset of your attitude to imply that I am a crazy hardliner and that I hate minorities: I do definitely not. But for you everybody is a hardliner and whatnot who does not agree with the current state of Volapük Wikipedia and who says that there is need for a fundamental solution in Volapük Wikipedia. Arnomane 22:28, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

It seems that it's you who doesn't read properly my comments: ...I wonder how many of the above supporters are actually supporting this specific case of Volapük Wikipedia or because they hate Volapük... , I never mentioned you specifically. The question is: how many, some for sure. I actually believe your thought is legitimate but I wonder how many of the supporting votes are in the same wavelength as yours. OK? Malafaya 11:28, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Adminship?

There are two parts to the request. If you do not have a background in Volapük as is not clear at all there is no point in giving you admin rights to this project. Even worse you would impose yourself on the existing Volapük community and assume seniority because your pov would be imposed as a consequence of this proposal. What I find unconscionable is that you do not even have a profile at this time while making a request like this. 00:14, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

When you argue that articles like Febul are not good, there is room to argue your case. The method that you choose is imho not appropriate. GerardM 00:14, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

Quote of myself: I therefore ask for adminship rights in Volapük Wikipedia or any other appropriate measure in order to remove the articles [...]. I leave the option how to achieve the article deletion open to the people that comment/decide, as long as it reaches the goal. The admin idea was one option that came into my mind. I just offered my help in case people agree with me that the majority of articles in this Wikipedia needs to be deleted. Arnomane 00:26, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

Please write what you want to see done and how you want to execute it. Without your involvement in the language and so straight after the request for closure for the project being turned down, you just have not accepted what has been voted on. this proposal is not credible at all without some practical ideas, a worked out road map. GerardM 00:40, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

Honestly this is one of the most detailed proposals on such things (compare it to the rest). Furthermore I made it super clear what I want:

1. Deletion of articles from Volapük Wikipedia, which were not written or substantially expanded by humans
2. Moving this project to the Incubator.

I see no way how to make these points clearer. With regard to the "how to delete". I trust ourselves that we can find a sensible yet effective solution. I don't need to propose everything myself. Arnomane 01:14, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

Your points are clearer, but not your procedure. If you want to be an admin at vo.wp, you should request admin privileges (at the vo:Vükiped:Kafetar, for instance) and wait for support from other users. For your request to look good, you should also have an account and have made at least some contributions to vo.wp in the last few months. Even though your proposal is well defined, it is not clear that its motives are good: there are good solutions for all the problems that you mention without changing the hard work done on vo.wp. If you don't like it, don't do it; but not everybody agrees. I think "tolerance" is the key word here. --Smeira 12:00, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

Comment on Rationale

"This is not a proposal for closing vo.wp": if this is not a closure proposal, why is this discussed in a section that is only for closure proposals? Shouldn't this be moved somewhere else, then? Anyway, on the proposed points of the rationale:

• If you read the reasons given by those who voted for supporting the Volapük Wikipedia, you'll see that the (undeniable) historical importance of Volapük wasn't mentioned more than a couple of times. The main reason for opposing closure was actually that the proposal itself was not well thought, had no real strong arguments (all arguments presented had flaws that were duly pointed out and never really corrected by the proposers), and read more like prejudice against people who choose not to follow the de.wp style sheet.
• Several points here:
  • "People are upset" is not a good argument. If they're upset, they should discuss their problems, present arguments, and try to convince the others, trying to reach consensus. If they're upset, but don't manage to convince the others, they should understand that their upset feelings are not shared by all, and should refrain from further action. In other words: they should show tolerance. Tolerance doesn't imply support or even agreement: it implies respect for the opinion of others. If this is not done, then trolling is not far away.
  • "One contributor". We're now around 5 with active contributions in the last month, not counting anonymous contributions. Please have a look at the contributions of e.g. Malafaya, Robert, LadyInGrey, Chabi, Zifs etc.
  • "100'000 articles": the worthlessness of article count as a measure of quality should by now be obvious to anyone. If you want to know which Wikipedias are better and which are worse, article number is not what you should look at. Please use e.g. the List of Wikipedias by sample of articles, or then please come up with a new measure of quality and present it to others. Complaining about articles number is simply a en:Misuse of statistics.
  • Interwiki links are not the responsability of any Wikipedia. If you want to delete interwiki links to vo.wp from your home wikipedia, feel free to do so. Please request bot users to help you with that. (And also please think a bit more about why there are interwiki links at all -- when you classify links to stubs as "useless", you seem to be missing the point.)
  • Cheating of edit statistics: I think of it as demonstrating, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that article count is not what you should be looking at if you're interested in comparing quality across Wikipedias. Please have a look at en:Misuse of statistics, at the discussion of the proposal for closure of the Volapük Wikipedia, and at the List of Wikipedias by sample of articles.
  • Abuse of Wikimedia resources: how? how much? which resources are being "abused"? what is the cost? The best estimates I've heard go about a few cents by month -- which any of the Volapük Wikipedians would be delighted to pay. Without numbers, this looks like a potential red herring.
  • No use of bot articles for interested readers: what exactly does this mean? Is a human-created article like de:O'Fallon (Illinois) more "useful for potential readers" then the (much better written) vo:O'Fallon (Illinois)? If criteria are not presented, one may suppose there's a lurking immanentist claim here of the kind "an article is never good if it was bot-created" and "an article is always good if it was human-created", both of which are clearly fallacies, as the previous example shows.
  • A Wikipedia driven by a single person: we now have two active admins, Smeira and Malafaya, and several other contributors. Please check current statistics before making such claims. (There is a question, of course, if any Wikipedia with few admins/contributors can really be NPOV; but this is a different -- and potentially interesting -- topic.)
• Wikipedia is... I think Wikipedia is a very flexible thing, which is being formed and changed all the time, and I think the user communities are the ones who decide what they want to do. If you want to bring up the discussion of what the Volapük Wikipedia is or should be, please open an account there and start a discussion with the other users. There are several things I think are wrong with other Wikipedias (say, de.wp), but if I'm not a contributor there, I don't think I have the right to request outside help to force them to change. The correct way to express my disagreement would be to go to de.wp and explain my opinions there and try to convince the others.
• The Lombard Wikipedia. Two points:
  • Its community came to the conclusion that it was better to delete the articles. Note that the decision was not imposed from outside: defenders of the Lombard Wikipedia, who were active contributors, decided to do this and acted on their (majority) decision. I don't see any active Volapük contributors here supporting this proposal.
  • The main reason for the problems in the Lombard Wikipedia was the use of an "artificial dialect" which other users did not recognize and considered illegitimate. Furthermore, there were accusations of anti-Italian or nationalistic feelings (from both sides, actually). If they couldn't even decide how articles should be written in their Wikipedia, and what the right tone was to treat outsiders, then there is of course good reason to rethink the whole thing. The number of bot articles was cited as one argument in one section of the discussion; it wasn't the most important one, and it wasn't decisive in any way.

In the end, a final comment: this proposal looks more like the work of people who felt angry because they couldn't get their ideas accepted, and who want to stop someone else's work just because their ideas of what it should be are "the only good ones". There are more relevant questions here (as Aphaia points out in the general discussion section), but it is interesting that none of them was mentioned as a motive here. "Tolerance" is a good word here: I'd recommend the proposers to consider it. There's a lot of work for everyone in every Wikipedia; why not go about making a good encyclopedia instead of loosing time condemning others for doing something different? --Smeira 11:47, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

Plase write shorter. I am smply lost in your text and fear that I misunderstand you. Arnomane 11:52, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

There is a lot to say. If something is lost or misunderstood, just ask me, here or on my talk page. I can also speak German if need be. --Smeira 11:53, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

It is not the language that is a problem. It is your writing style. Give plain simple points. Arnomane 12:23, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

I did so. None of my points is longer or has a different style than the ones you present in the rationale for the proposal. Again, if there's anything you can't follow there, ask me, and I'll express it in other words. --Smeira 12:26, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

Importing to Incubator

Importing those 114.000 articles to Incuibator would be – apart from that importing all content to Incubator would be the same as closing – quite difficult, maybe even impossible. I'm one of them who run imports to Incubator and it would take ages to get all pages via vo:Special:Allpages (to prefix them) and to upload them via incubator:Special:Import because the maximum execution time of 60 seconds would expire. Furthermore, also when all bot-created articles are deleted, I think there'll still be many articles to import to Incubator, and why import when the proposal for closing has ended with a "keep" result? So, this is a second attempt to close the Volapük Wikipedia because taking away the pages is closing the wiki. --MF-Warburg 16:01, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

I propose a different idea: eliminating the bot-created dismal stubs (choosing a lower bytes limit, say, deleting articles shorter than 500 bytes, not counting disambiguations and such), and then not move vo.wp to the Incubator, which would be a difficult and potentially wrong thing to do, but leave it as any other Wikipedia. It can also be placed under a strict observation to ensure the volapük community does not make the same mistakes all over again, but without taking Vükiped back to the Incubator. What do you think? -- Leptictidium 14:13, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

I think this is basically the same as Yekrats' proposal, isn't it? --Smeira 03:12, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Framing the discusssion

Disclosure: I was drawn to this discussion by Arnomane's blog posting.

I believe that the issue of how an article is created is a red herring. Creating an article with the assistance of a bot is intended to be an act similar to sowing seeds in that any outside observer expects both -- the article & the seed -- to grow. If bot-created articles do grow into useful articles -- as did many of the Rambot-created articles, to cite one example -- then it is a good thing; if too many of these bot-created articles fail to grow, then it is a bad thing, & shows that the wikipedia where they were created is not viable.

The question in this case is whether there is a viable community that will support the Volapük Wikipedia: some believe there is, some believe there is not & argue that this use of a bot was done to obscure this fact. However, using a bot to create thousands of articles only proves that someone wanted to create thousands of articles. It does not prove or disprove that a viable Volapük community exists. Should this proposal fail to carry, I believe that we should disable use of bots on this Wikipedia for 6-12 months & see just how many of these articles become more than just stubs, then discuss whether this is enough to justify an independent Volapük Wikipedia or to take the appropriate action to move it to the incubator. -- Llywrch 18:31, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Why Volapük

Why not Limburgish? Who should say this wiki has grown 750 articles today? IT DOUBLED IN SIZE!!!! It will be larger than the English Wiktionary in a few weeks time! These are the problem areas! Not a Wikipedia who doesn't grow anymore and recieves bad comments because it's big already! If the other wiki's continue to grow as fast, Volapük will be on the 25th place over a year! --Umbel 12:54, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

What's the problem? Let it double in size! If I want a good sized Wiktionary, I'll make one. --OosWesThoesBes 13:04, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Hm, Umbel, would you mind discussing the reason why you think that growing fast with a bot is bad for a wiktionary -- assuming, of course, that the articles it creates are readable and contain accurate, useful, and relevant information? (If you do this, you'll be the first one on this page.) --Smeira 03:14, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

That's the problem. They are not useful: there are over 600 of these articles. Many of these articles, which only say blablabla is an Arabian word (they even have a typo in it: it's euvergesjreve and not evergesjreve). This article sais that it's written in Arabian writing (definitely Latin) Bar-le-Duc? On a Wiktionary? These are just a few examples of how low the quality of the articles of OwtbBot is. Today only 400 of such pages have been created, 400!! 3 days ago there were 966 articles of which 50% was bot-made. Now there are over 2100 articles of which say 80% is bot-made. So almost 80% of the Wiktionary is trash. Umbel 10:18, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Yes, these pages have problems, and you are right to mention them. But should they be deleted? Or improved? Lots of pages in en.wp for instance have spelling mistakes; I myself (as an elf) have corrected some of them. Bots can do that. Are some articles incorrectly tagged, or do they contain wrong information ("Arabic text" when there is no Arabic text, etc.)? Yes, that should be corrected. 400 pages with mistakes created? Yes, they should all be corrected (that can be done by a bot: if the errors are similar, they can all be corrected by a bot in one day, too.) Are the pages about numbers not relevant to a Wiktionary? You may have a point there, which you should report to the admin (though I note the English Wiktionary does have pages on numbers: e.g. wikt:en:22, wikt:en:98, etc.). Are there 'too many stubs'? Well, I argue elsewhere that stubs are not necessarily bad, not even lots of them, if their (small) content is readable, relevant, accurate and useful. Note that the Ido wiktionary -- which contains more articles that the Volapük Wikipedia (Ido is another constructed language like Volapük and Esperanto, in fact it is a descendant of Esperanto) -- does have a lot of small stubs (human-created, but bots could easily produce exactly the same result; e.g.: wikt:io:fenêtre, wikt:io:linn, etc.); yet it is not a bad project -- in fact, if you look at its contributors' discussions and at the overall structure, you'll see it's a very good project.
Anyway, none of the above are reasons to delete the pages, but simply to report them. Now, you will have reason to ask for deleting them if you report these mistakes and then, after a reasonable amount of time, nothing happens. If the admins are not taking any action to correct the errors, if they're simply ignoring them, then you have a reason for outsider interference. But, from my experience with OosWesThoesBes, I think he will try to take care of these problems. --Smeira 11:15, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

I'll correct the arabian things. Please note that the numbers from 101 untill 600 are not mentioned on any other Wiktionary and are useful for that reason. About the towns in France. Why not? Please take a dictionary. Amsterdam and Brussel are mentioned, so why Bar-le-Duc not? --OosWesThoesBes 13:03, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

If everything is right all evergesjreves have been replaced with euvergesjreves. I don't know for sure, because my computer crashed twice... --OosWesThoesBes 13:33, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

I know OWTB personally in "real life" and I know why he wants to have a gigantic Wiki in Limburgish. He wants to show that Limburgish is a real language and not just a dialect. Proposals for closing projects/Closure of Limburgish Wiktionary was a bad idea, but a radical clean-up not. Maybe it has to be proposed in a few days if he keeps creating stubs about numbers. In the meantime 700 articles with the same content exist: 700 is a number. ¿It's written in Limburgish as 700? and a table with nonsense and unuseful information. Are 700 of these stubs necessairy? I have nothing against bots and bot articles. I'm currently checking vo.wp and looking to the content I might oppose this request, but if a town is asituated in Meuse, it's not smart to locate it in Lorraine (the coördinates are not correct on many stubs). li.wikt is useless and I feel obligated to rescue li.wikt before it's too late. Umbel 14:39, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Doog d'r den zelf get aan! --OosWesThoesBes 14:47, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

@Umbel: let me know which pages you think have the wrong coordinates, and I'll investigate. How many are they? (The locating dot does seem to be somewhat displaced -- by about 20 km or so -- with respect to the actual position; this is a problem they already have in fr.wp, as one of their admins told me on my talk page and may derive from some slight imperfection in the map itself. Since Meuse and Lorraine are adjacent, this might explain your impression. Check the corresponding fr.wp pages to see if they similarly misplace the cities/villages you've found.) --Smeira 21:36, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Alternative solutions

It has occurred to me that all "problems" mentioned in the rationale for this proposal have solutions other than deleting useful vo.wp stubs. If these possible solutions are not seriously discussed, how exactly is this proposal "fair and balanced" rather than a mere expresion of the personal biases of a certain group of people? Consider:

• interwiki links: can be solved independently (e.g., as Kameraad Pjotr had suggested on the closure discussion, by putting vo.wp in your spam filter; or by discussing and changing bot policy). But: is this really a problem? Why should people be angry about lots of interwiki links? Even links to stubs? Most interwiki links are links to stubs or small articles anyway (just click on a number of interwiki links to randomly chosen languages from various pages -- you'll see it).
• cheating on statistics: everybody knows article count is not a good statistical measure of anything except... the number of articles. So: select a different criterion, make a new list based on this new criterion (the List of Wikipedias by sample of articles is an example) and use this list instead.
• abuse of Wikimedia resources: the "abuse" is too small to mention. The average Wikimedia user probably throws out food leftovers worth more per month than the whole vo.wp costs the WF in a year. (If you don´t agree, can you provide better numbers?).
• no use of bot articles for interested users: that is not really a problem, just a statement of belief. Can anyone name a user who thought a certain Volapük article would be useful but then noticed it wasn't -- and the reason was that the article was bot-created?
• (The rationale mentions there were many more reasons in the proposal for closure. I went back there and couldn't find them. Could someone mention here what other problems vo.wp had created that have not been mentioned here?)
• Neutral point of view: that is a potential problem; but I think it is lessened by the presence of more active users. The way to solve it would be to get even more active users at vo.wp of course, not delete articles. In what way would deleting articles contribute to a more NPOV vo.wp? (In fact, can anyone mention any article in vo.wp which could be considered as a NPOV-violation? Such articles were found easily on the Lombard wikipedia, as I recall.)
• Bot articles contain similar sentences. Is this a problem? I could run the bot to vary the sentences from page to page, there is always some other way to say the same. But why is this a problem? (Note that among the 23,000 remaining articles in the Lombard Wikipedia, there are many which were bot-created but were simply improved rather than deleted.) (I will again mention, for the record, that bot-created stubs are not bad; they are simply stubs, and should be judged like any other stubs. Again: vo:O'Fallon (Illinois), though bot-created, is much better than de:O'Fallon (Illinois), which is human-created. Should someone request admin rights on de.wp to delete "miserable Artikel" like de:O'Fallon (Illinois)? --Smeira 01:21, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

  Until you do not accept that generating nearly 100% of Volapük Wikipedia with a bot was downright wrong and should never be done again I see absolutely no chance to come to any compromise with you. Your stategy seems to be to jeopardize every constructive critical debate on Volapük Wikipedia with cloudy lengthy words and I definitely don't want to play that game with you. Arnomane 10:13, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

  If this is so obvious, why don't you explain why? Why is a large numer of bot-generated useful stubs bad? You are so convinced, please tell us why. Or else it will look like a religious dogma. I repeat: I challenge this idea. Please present arguments. No words here are longer than 3 syllables; there should be no problem. --Smeira 21:19, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

You have nothing to say about other people and their works. Keep your nose out of it and stay in DAS Heimat. Stop spoiling other peoples work .... oh no that is a German tradition I forgot. Waerth 10:20, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Have You others to say as personal attacs. Liesel 10:30, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Waerth it was pointed out how baldly this project affects other Wikipedias. Furthermore please learn better German until you teach me about my mother language or simply stop doing it. I also don't do the same with your mother language. Thank you. Arnomane 10:39, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

No, it wasn't. Every one of the "problems" you mention is addressed in the suggested solutions here in this section. You refuse to discuss them; you show yourself as biased and prejudiced. Let me state this clearly: why don't you discuss the solutions proposed for the "problems" you listed rather than repeating your religious belief about bot articles being bad? It looks as if you don't want to solve the problems you raise; you simply want to undo other people's work. --Smeira 21:23, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

@Waerth: Tja, Waerth, helaas heeft-ie gelijk: die Heimat, niet das Heimat. Maar das Vaterland zou goed zijn geweest hoor! :-) Een probleempje: het is geen goed idee om Arnomanes gedrag als 'German tradition' te bekritiseren. Wat je hebt gezegd lijkt op een vooroordeel, daar er Duitsers hier zijn die zich goed hebben gedragen, en die zelfs dit voorstel niet ondersteunen. --Smeira 11:34, 30 December 2007 (UTC) Yes, Waerth, unfortunately he's right: die Heimat, not das Heimat. But das Vaterland would have worked :-)! Now a problem: it's not a good idea to criticize Arnomane's behavior as a "German tradition". What you said looks like prejudice, since there are Germans here who have behaved well, and who even don't support this proposal. --Smeira 11:34, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

IMHO, a set of rules should be created for cases like this. How many Wikimedia projects are subject to a Closure Proposal 2 or 3 months after they started, without giving the user a chance to actually start it? Is this fair? Like this, there are many others votings that are plainly subjective (in my opinion, this voting is such a thing, envolving love/hate feelings towards a project) rather that conscious ones. A voting like this is just a mass phenomenon. It doesn't reflect any real "justice", just how many "fans my team has" (it's very easy to detect the German majority in the supporters). I would like to propose to users to create a bunch of objective and fair rules for closure. After that, time should be given to all (not just Volapük or any particular project) to implement or to abide by those rules/criteria.

For all those who think I'm a Volapük fanatic, I'm not. Volapük Wikipedia just fell from the sky. I happened to be curious for an interwiki link and found that Wiki. After checking it out, I thought I could work on it to improve it. It's obvious that the contents is not of the best quality but you would be surprised if you could measure the quality improvement of the past, say, 2 months. And this is how people should think: improve, not destroy. Actually, this proposal is worse than a close: by closing, the contents is frozen and copied somewhere else. In this proposal, basically most contents will be destroyed and still the project will be "closed" (moved to Incubator). Malafaya 11:46, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Note that 'Bot articles contain similar sentences' is a bit of a non-complaint. For example, take the number articles on en.wp. The introduction to all these is pretty much the same. "N is the natural number following N-1 and preceding N+1". Regardless of whether that was created by a human or a bot, it is a good and reasonable first sentence to the article and in these cases consistency is a good thing, because it makes finding information easier for people already familiar with the format. I don't see 'bot style' as a problem at all, provided it is 'good style'. If it is not, then write a better bot to fix it! --HappyDog 20:18, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Project which boycotts interwiki links from other project written in a valid language may be faced with interwiki boycott, too. --Millosh 21:54, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Proposal

Let me please portray my thoughts about the whole:

At first I want to express, that I think that this proposal is not viable. The proposal is about moving the wiki back to the Incubator. If you look at Proposals for closing projects/Archive you can see, that a closure carried out in most cases does allow for re-creation of the project. For example if a viable community for Kanuri is formed, the closed project will get a new Wikipedia. So a move back to the Incubator is effectively the same as a closure of the project and a closure was rejected. Implementation of this proposal would eviscerate the outcome of the recent rejected proposal.

Well, there is the second point about deleting all bot-generated content. Smeira's O'Fallon example makes clear, that bot-generated content is not per se worse than human-generated content. So we should look at the actual content. The problematic content is created by the user SmeiraBot. If I got it right, all problematic bot content is created solely by this one user (if that is not correct, please notice me). I assume, the bot articles are created in series (like "articles on all American towns", "articles on all French communes" etc.). Every of these series should be reviewed. For example the series on American towns (example vo:O'Fallon (Illinois)) seems to be of good quality, comparable to the Rambot articles on English Wikipedia (I take Rambot as a precedent on what should be allowed on young projects and what not). I see no use in deleting these articles. The series on French communes (example vo:Alleyrac) seems to be of lesser quality. They are very short and provide few information.

So, my proposal would be to review these series and delete those which are of lesser quality and keep those, which are of better quality. The second point of my proposal is: SmeiraBot (or other accounts driven by Smeira) should not be allowed to create new series of bot-created articles without community approval. If he wants to re-insert articles on French communes (assumed they will be deleted through point 1 of my proposal) he has to detail his insertion plans on an extra community page on the Volapük Wikipedia and the community reviews it. He should provide articles out of the series as example and give details on the facts that will be included in the articles and what the sources are for those facts. By this there should be no danger of errors sneaking in (like it was reported about the earlier bot articles). As an extensiveness threshold I would propose the Rambot articles as a precedent. If there is an amount of information covered in the articles that is comparable to original Rambot (example [5]) the bot-run should be approved (I count [by rule of thumb] some 15 information bits in Rambot articles, like population, area, racial make-up, income etc.), if they are more like the stubs on French communes, they should not be approved and not inserted (in the example article vo:Alleyrac I count 4 information bits: area, population, geographic coordinates and info on where the commune is situated [subnational entities]).

This should be a working measure to avoid poor quality articles. On the other side it won't avoid bot-articles and the proposal cannot avoid Volapük climbing to more than 100,000 articles again. Therefore the proposal won't satisfy bot article opponents. But I think it is a fair proposal and it is based on actual quality and not solely on the identity of the creator of the articles.

--::Slomox:: >< 13:34, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Slomox, your proposal sounds quite fair to me. Let me add that in the past several weeks, the work that has been done was actually transforming those articles with errors and the ones with very little information in better articles. Obviously, thousands of articles cannot be corrected in 1 month but slowly we were going in that direction. Malafaya 13:45, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

P.S.: There's something that hasn't been mentioned here so far but in case some measure is adopted and articles are effectively deleted, care must be taken not to delete Volapük-related small/stub articles which don't have a widespread source anymore. Most articles about Volapükans are extracted from 19th century books and magazines which are not available to the general public anymore and thus are hard to reproduce. Malafaya 13:47, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

You're turning things upside down. You (the Volapük Wikipedia people) created these huge mass of crap "articles" and now you ask for some more time to make them better??? You make me lough. Eeven en.wikipedia didn't manage to improve a large part of Rambot articles up to now. How many articles can you improve per day? Let us say 2, that makes 700 per year and person. Now take 10 persons working with this high intensity. How long does it take? But I fear you are living inside your own reality. Arnomane 15:57, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Please {{be civil}} and don't say "crap" to disqualify (or I'm able to say that this is a fucking vote :/). 700 per year? It is a good amount for me! 555 16:01, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

An "article" that does not contain a single sentence is crap per definitionem and an admin that calls a person a vandal who properly asked for deleting a couple of such "articles" in vo.wikipedia simply does not deserve to be an admin. This very person Smeira is simply a vain person that seeks for attention and who simply hides his inability to write an encyclopedia behind cloudy words such as "community is a group of organisms [...] sharing a space and common interests". Pardon: A bacteria colony (on my laptop keyboard) is a Wikipedia community??? Probably a bot is part of a community, too according to Smeira. This shows that he simply is not interested in any useful debate but just in defending himself regardless if it makes sense or not. Arnomane 17:50, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Still, I see no usefulness in personal attacks in this discussion. Malafaya 17:53, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Still I'd like to talk on topic and like to get answers to my questions and points not some cloudy words and some meta debates on "personal attacks". A person that did something wrong did something wrong no chance to hide this with "no personal attacks" and I am not going to stop calling this person incorrigible until he agrees that this was wrong. Arnomane 18:01, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Ok then. Please, give me a pointer to a WMF rule or any other non-biased text that objectively states that what Smeira did is plainly wrong. And what was your question? Malafaya 18:04, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Arnomane, first of all, FYI, I didn't create ANY of those articles and they are not crappy as they are the only online resource for Volapük history, so please mind your words or you may be actually labeled as discriminating. I don't even understand what you are trying to achieve. What kind of words are you reading from my comments?! I'm not asking for some time! I'm suggesting that this is not something to be voted for and some rules should be established before projects start being closed at random because some bunch of users wants. I don't need your pity. There are absolutely no RULES anywhere that state that ANY of the arguments you give for closure/erasure/whatever of the Volapük Wikipedia are reasons (some even not completely true) for closing a project. So why is all that arrogance? And I can tell you that if this proposal goes forth, I wouldn't like to be in the skin of whoever will have to "shutdown" the project and still let's see what the LangCom and WMF or whoever is responsible for the existence of these projects has to say about this "voting". And most of all, who are you to say that the work done by Rambot is a bad thing? Are you the Wikipedias' god or something? Are you owner of the unique truth? Stop being arrogant and keep the conversation at a good level. If I make you "laugh", that's your problem. If I live in my "own reality", that's my own problem. Please, just keep focused discussing this matter just like I'm trying to when I'm not interrupted by uncivilized and insultuous comments like yours. Malafaya 17:46, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

First of all you yourself complained that I forgot to credit your contributions to Volapük Wikipedia. And now you complain that I made you responsible for these articles, too? You can't argue in both directions. Decide: Either - or. An above all: I never asked for closing Volapük Wikipedia. Think more, write less. Arnomane 18:07, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Again you're zig-zagging. Yes, I'm a contributor (as stated in my vote), and no, I didn't create the unique articles about Volapük history (as stated on my previous reply). Anything else you can't understand or you're just trying to have the ownership of the last post on this thread? Malafaya 18:10, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Slomox, your suggestion is quite sensible; I think it's a good point to start. Let me add a secondary suggestion: the shorter stubs could also be improved and made more informative (also by bots: as we talk, SmeiraBot is adding coordinate templates to the French stubs). If it is possible to make them as long and informative as, say, the Dutch or Portuguese bot-created stubs on the same cities (e.g.: nl:Buchères) -- and this shouldn't be too hard; I've been working on this problem in my spare time for a few weeks now -- would you agree that they could be retained, just as in the Rambot stubs case? Or do you think this would still not be sufficient? --Smeira 22:02, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Arnomane: I think you're losing your civility much too fast. Please consider that the people who are talking here may not share your views (not everybody thinks that bot-created stubs are evil), but not because they don't like you or don't appreciate your work in your own wikipedia. There are other viewpoints, there are other ways of thinking, there is no need to be offensive, to use words like "crap" and to repeat slogans as if they were God's truth. Please remember that your proposal did not mention "bot articles are evil" as the reason: you mentioned interwikis, people being upset, abuse of resources, etc. I made useful suggestions on each of these points. Reacting to them and proposing ideas -- like Slomox -- is much more constructive than getting angry.
A final comment: why do you accuse me of being vain and seeking attention, when you're the one setting up pages like this one, which attracts much more attention than anything I did myself? If you left vo.wp in peace, I don't think anybody would be talkng about me now. As I recall, the author of the first closure proposal (as Slomox so clearly shows, this is really the second closure proposal) also said s/he was sorry for the amount of attention the proposal had gotten -- if only it hadn't happened!... Smeira 22:02, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

@ vo.WP

Granted that many people see a problem with the current status of vo.WP, how would your community wish to address these concerns? I understand that you must feel upset by how things began here, but may we please put that behind us and have a fresh start? Would your comminty aggree to follow either Llywrch's or Yekrats's suggestions?--BirgitteSB 21:18, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Birgitte, we are surely open to discuss these proposals like we have always been, had anyone started it in a conventional and peaceful way. I'm afraid though that so far it seems the supporters of this voting would not accept those suggestions or else they would have already stated that here. Let me reinforce the idea that most articles do not fit in the outlined alternate proposals so far. I still believe only a few thousand articles are small in size, contain 3 or less sentences while not being legitimate support or disambiguation pages. But in something I totally agree with you: no one is better suited to select articles than the Volapük community itself. Malafaya 22:30, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Even if it is not a large number of articles, the deletion by vo.WP of non-disambiguation pages with less than 3 sentances would be a very useful gesture. It would show that you are seriously considering the concerns raised here even if you cannot completely agree with some of the people voting "support". No one is really expecting everyone to agree 100% anyways. The goal is to simply find enough agreement that whatever differences remain are not significant enough to merit continued debate.--BirgitteSB 22:42, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

I agree. And indeed I have been saying that some suggestions here are worth discussing. Yet the proposer keeps the same radical position: deletion and Incubator, refusing any idea of compromise. Therefore, and as the voting apparently will continue to an "everything or nothing" result, I (and I speak for myself in this matter) haven't been expending a big effort in commenting or analyzing those compromise suggestions too much anymore (A much better suggestion would be giving us time to identify and make those less than 3 sentence articles at least 3 sentences long but apparently many people prefer "destroying" rather than "constructing"). Anyway, and let me give this a strong emphasis as no one seems to be bothered by it, is it actually fair that we are "obliged"/"suggested" to delete some articles when nowhere else that has actually been done? How many Wikis are there with the same kind of articles and they are left alone? Let's not say it's off-topic cause it's not. Same criteria IS to be applied everywhere: small communities, big communities, many articles, few articles. I don't think it's just or actually in any guidelines of WMF projects to discriminate a project in such fashion. If we are to delete 10K articles (still leaving vowiki above 100K, and still leaving the "interwiki problem" unsolved) because they are too small or because they were bot-created, shouldn't that be required in other projects as well? And let's not insist that quantity of such articles is the problem here. Either these articles, many or few, are a problem or they are not. Same criteria should be applied WM-wide. I'm sorry for making your life harder, Birgitte. I know you're trying to help. 82.154.217.253 01:20, 29 December 2007 (UTC) Malafaya

I just saw the outcome of the proposal to "cleanup" the Polish Wikipedia and I can't help commenting. How come a proposal like this can be applied to Volapük Wikipedia, generate all this fuss, having alternate actions proposed and yet, the same kind of request for the Polish Wikipedia (big Wikipedia, big community, natural language) was immediately considered as vandalism and closed? Where is it different in this sense? Is it because of its large community, who would make the proposal inviable? Is it because it's spoken by far more people than Volapük? How can it not be discrimination? It's very easy to check that Polish Wikipedia suffers of the same "problem" as Volapük Wikipedia in this sense: lots of "low-quality"/short stub articles. That proposal makes as much sense as this one for that matter. Yet, the proposal (as ridiculous as this one may seem, in my opinion) was "vandalism"?! Can anyone please explain what's the fundament for this? I'm afraid the WM projects are definitely becoming full of prejudice, and, as a contributor to some projects and a Wikimedia fan, I feel very sorry for that. Malafaya 02:03, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Well, Malafaya, I think the 'support' people would claim that the differences you mention (big Wikipedia, big community, natural language) are sufficient to justify different treatment. I can see their point. The Polish Wikipedia, because of its larger community, has done a lot more good work than we have in the Volapük Wikipedia; if you filter out all the bad words and the bad karma, at least some of the supporters are simply concerned that we can't do as well as the Polish did. Maybe it still is discrimination; but I can see why people would be honestly and sincerely worried by the differences. (For example, some African languages, despite having relatively large numbers of speakers -- a few million --, still might have very few or no Wikipedians, just because these few million speakers have little or no access to the Internet. If one of these languages had a project like vo.wp, someone could express concern about the possibility that it would ever become good, and even though you could debate what standards these people use for their criticism ('good'? 'by what criteria?', etc.), you certainly wouldn't accuse them of being prejudiced against Black people or against African languages. Not necessarily.) --Smeira 12:20, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Sure. I was referring to discrimination of a WM project in particular, not a race or language (although many hard comments here and on the previous closure proposal make is seem there is a discrimination by some users towards this language). 85.243.22.71 13:28, 29 December 2007 (UTC) Malafaya

@Birgitte: Thanks for your well-balanced approach! Let me give you my position: I understand that people here have expressed concerns (basically about whether or not bot-created articles are acceptable, and if so, how many are acceptable), but I would like to challenge this assumption: maybe they are acceptable if they contain information that is (a) useful (answers questions people might have about the topic), (b) relevant (is the kind of information you'd find in a standard reference work) and (c) correct (contains no errors). These are the criteria I suggest. What I am worried about is that the 'support' people don't address them, and I really don't understand why they prefer to repeat vague accusations about us "wanting to destroy the discussion" or "being against the very idea of an encyclopedia". Now, on Llywrch's and Yekrat's proposals: in principle I don't agree with them, because of my opinion on bot-created stubs and also because of the enormous amount of work we both and other users have already put into them, but if a majority of vo.wp users does agree (Malafaya seems inclined to agree; if another two people from vo.wp also think so, that would give you a majority), then I will of course follow the majority decision. But let me make a counter-proposal to both Llywrch's and Yekrat's: since both of them are concerned with the size and amount of information that the bot stubs have, would it satisfy them if someone (say, I) ran another bot to increase them, so that they look like the bot-created stubs from the Dutch and Portuguese Wikipedias (e.g. nl:Buchères)? This is not impossible, since it is exactly what happened in these Wikipedias. I could probably do that myself in a couple of months. --Smeira 12:26, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

I agree, Smeira. I'm sure we can add more info easily. And it's also a constructive approach. 85.243.22.71 13:28, 29 December 2007 (UTC) Malafaya

The Chaddy Case

Since Arnomane, in his/her beautiful, non-POV style, has criticized me for blocking Chaddy's account at vo.wiki, let me explain the case from my viewpoint. (Of course, this should be a vo.wp-internal affair; we should be discussing it on the vo.wp pub. But still, for the information of the wider public...) I'll try to avoid longer words and whatever Arnomane says is "cloudy" -- but s/he must promise to also behave in a civil way.

a. As Malafaya says: where are the rules I'm supposed to have broken? Are they cross-wiki? b. Chaddy opened a new page at vo.wp, and immediately proceeded to tag month stubs as "non-articles". S/he:

1. did not create a user page (despite having received our welcome on his talk page);
2. did not provide any information on him/herself and why he was doing that;
3. did not explain his/her actions on the corresponding talk pages;
4. did not initiate any discussions about when tagging is and is not indicated before moving to action (e.g. at the local pub: vo:Vükiped:Kafetar, where s/he never participated);
5. did not look around for a while to see how things are done, did not ask any advice or help on deciding for anything, and did not use other possibilities. (There is a category: vo:Klad:Pads koräkabik for articles that should be corrected. This is the first step, not immediate deletion.)
6. Because of the above behavior, I claim s/he was at least impolite and disrespectful of the community s/he apparently wanted to be a memer of.

Now, for the blocking: I agree that s/he should have been warned and told to behave properly, not blocked. S/he pointed this out on my talk page, and I have duly deblocked him/her. It is now up to him/her to show good intentions: there are lots of ways to contribute to vo.wp, it is simply a question of choosing one of them and doing some good work.

Now, the reason why s/he was immediately blocked was:
-- During the discussion for the closure of vo.wp, various vandals had tried to attack vo.wp. Several of them used the same method: tagging articles for immediate deletion. (See the section: "Vigilantes" in the closure proposal for documentation.) Like Chaddy, they had come in unasked, did not create userpages, did not ask anybody's advice, and immediately started tagging pages. Their behavior was so outrageous that User:Siebrand said he'd request steward assistance. Now, Chaddy's first changes followed the same behavior. If it is true that Chaddy only had good intentions and just wanted to help vo.wp grow and flourish, than I am indeed sorry: s/he was blocked only because of the bad behavior of some vandals from de.wp. Given their behavior, I think this was an understandable mistake. I will not make it again. --Smeira 21:45, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

lol Now, I have my own chapter... Have I really to inform the whole world and have I really to have a user page, when I want to propose an empty page for speedy deletion? The main difference between me and these vandals is that I listed an empty page for deletion. But the vandals wanted to delete articles. And by the way, how should I find e. g. vo:Klad:Pads koräkabik when I don´t understand this language? Chaddy 22:19, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Well, Chaddy, that problem exists in every Wiki where you don't speak the language :). I have that problem too in smaller wikis. I was also going to mention the possible reason for Chaddy's blocking but I see Smeira already answered. As in the previous voting, we are currently experiencing vandal attacks. I had to block 5 or 6 new accounts today for vandalism and therefore I could have made the same mistake as Smeira blocking Chaddy inadvertedly. Sorry, Chaddy. Malafaya 00:37, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Hi Chaddy. You have a point: perhaps it's not necessary to create a user page if your only goal is to report a few pages for deletion. But why didn't you do it as an anonymous then? As for how to find out about categories: if you look at your talk page on vo.wp (vo:Gebanibespik:Chaddy), you'll see the little welcome template (with a translation into German). There, links to admins: vo:Geban:Smeira and vo:Geban:Malafaya are given, and you are requested to ask in case you had doubts. So the right thing to do is: go to any of us, point out the page in question, and ask what the usual procedure is. You could also go to the pub (vo:Vükiped:Kafetar) and ask questions there. That's how you would also find out about ongoing projects (the correction of mistakes in the geo stubs, the translation of articles in the List of articles here at Meta, and other such things). There are lots of ways in which you can help -- also by making suggestions, if you want. Just be polite, ask for help, and discuss. You'll soon know everything. (Also: you don't have to understand the language to work there, but it sure helps. If you want a link to a Volapük course, my recommendation is Volapük Vifik = Quick Volapük, by Ralph Midgley. There's a good dictionary Volapük-English (also by Ralph Midgley) Linglänapük-Volapük here. Good luck!) --Smeira 01:37, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

I surely don´t want to learn Volapük. Chaddy 12:42, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Then why do you want to be a Volapük Wikipedian? --Smeira 13:25, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

To all supporters of this proposal

Dear all: let's please keep the discussion civil. Why start throwing words like "crap" and "junk" around, as if they had any meaning other than "I don't like it"? In the gmane discussion (see link on the talk page of this dicussion), words like "Mist" (=manure) and "Bytemüll" (= byte trash) are thrown around: does that make your opinion look more grounded and scientific? Why start throwing accusations around (Arnomane: "your attitude to imply I am a crazy harldliner and I hate minorities: I do definitely not". Nobody is claiming you do, Arnomane. You're just not answering my reactions to your rationale -- the proposed solutions to the "problems" you raise.)? Why make angry proposals on the spur of the moment (like the Polish Radical Cleanup proposal; Certh: now that the proposal was closed and will be archived, I think you've realized it was a bad idea)? Why not simply answer the arguments? I'll summarize here:

• The cleanup proposal should be made at vo.wp, not at Meta. Support from vo.wp users for such a move is necessary (see the Lombard case).
• The transference to incubator has technical problems and may be impossible (per MF-Warburg).
  • Consequence: these problems seem to make this proposal technically equivalent to a second closure proposal; and closure was already discussed and rejected at Meta.
• The problems mentioned in the rationale of the proposal have other solutions (see relevant section above).
• The real reason for this proposal is anger about bot-created stubs. But they're not necessarily bad -- not even many of them. I think they can actually be good -- not wonderful, but just good. Many people who oppose this proposal clearly don't think they're necessarily bad -- in vo.wp or elsewhere. A discussion must be started on this topic before action is taken against specific Wikipedias.
• BirgitteSB expressed concern about the nature of this proposal. Indeed, it can be used as a dangerous precedent for any groups who want to break wiki-autonomy to stage coups-d'état, or to impose outsider views on other communities. What do you think?

Please, let's talk about these things, and in a civil way. Arnomane: nobody is saying that you're a Volapük hater like Fossa. You're an admin at de.wp, and you've done good work there. I have nothing personal against you; nobody here has. In your 2006 election page, you mention Astronomie and Raumfahrt as two of your major interests; I happen to like these too. I am an amateur astronomer (I even once presented a paper on the evolution of G-class main-sequence stars in a students' Astronomy conference in Hokkaido, Japan, organized by the Japanese Association for Mathematical Sciences -- JAPS). I have written several articles on stars at vo.wp (see e.g. vo:Proxima Centauri, or the whole category: vo:Klad:Stels.). I repeat: there is no intention to suggest anything bad about anybody. Those who want to look bad -- like Fossa -- can do that by themselves, without my help.

A final note: the Polish Cleanup Proposal suggests that at least some of the supporters of this proposal (note I'm not saying you, Arnomane; I am saying: clearly Certh, and maybe others) don't know much about the WMF and its policies and principles, or about the procedures here at Meta. Wouldn't it have been better if you people had talked to the Meta administrators before starting this proposal? Or if you had asked a steward's opinion? (see what BrigitteSB had to say about the proposal above). Please note: I am not being ironical, I am not offensively accusing you all of not being good Wikipedians; I am merely mentioning that there are other things you could have done before starting this proposal. --Smeira 14:05, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

To all opponents of this proposal. Can you please start writing shorter. Can you please stop trying to have the last word in every thread? Can you please stop making a denial of service to any useful debate with lots of page revisions and posing everything an encylopedia is about into question? Thanks for your cooperation. Arnomane 15:59, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

To Arnomane. Since you ask questions and I would like to answer, it's inevitable that for now my post will be the last one (can I make it the one-but-last-one somehow?). I don't see why Smeira starting a new thread is being considered the "last word" because actually it's the first... but fine. Anyway, if it's to stop discussing this proposal, let's all just stop altogether but that would defeat the purpose of a voting such as this one, wouldn't it? I was basically resting from discussion already as I was waiting for any new development. As one doesn't happen, I would like to ask you what are we voting for at this point. Keeping it short, it has been shown that:

• The project won't be moved "back" to the Incubator for technical reasons as MF-Warburg said above. It would have to be closed and started from scratch. As people already mentioned, that would be a 2nd proposal for closure in 1 month after the first has been rejected and, to say the least, it's not of good taste (if you make 100 proposals of closure will you eventually win one of them?) and may even be not a valid proposal (anyone/any steward can confirm this please?).
• You being nominated sysop of the Volapük Wikipedia in these terms is a gross violation of a community's rights and a imposition of your own POV (what is a good article for you?) onto the local community, as GerardM mentions above.
• That leaves us with the any other appropriate measure which so far you have missed to mention.

So, at this point, we are voting for any appropriate measure to radically cleanup the Volapük Wikipedia, which, in my opinion, sounds too vague to be taken seriously.

I believe I have a valid topic here. I'd like you to explain what's the next step on this proposal. What are we voting for at this moment? And if you do so, this post of mine won't have the "last word" in this thread. Thank you, Malafaya 16:27, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

On the validity/legitimacy of this proposal

About "valid proposal": I don't know if there's any equal case to this, and I believe there is not. So you cannot say if this is a valid proposal or not, but since this actually is a second attempt to close vo:, it might be valid. We had also the deletion of Siberian Wikipedia, which followed the successful closing proposal, so, although this proposal is quite unusual (ungewöhnlich), IMHO it is valid unless a second attempt within such a short period of time is invalid. --MF-Warburg 16:35, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

MF-Warburg, thanks for your comment. In case this is to be taken as a closure again, a new proposal (3rd) should be started from scratch mentioning explicitly the closure, don't you think? So far, all people voted according to the original rationale above which stated it does not include closure, but a deletion of articles and moving the "good articles" to Incubator. We can consider that some people who supported this proposal so far could have not supported it in case of a more extreme closure proposal. Malafaya 16:54, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

MF-Warburg, BirgitteSB says this proposal is opposable because it violates the principles of WMF (violation of wiki-autonomy, since no attempt was made to discuss the topic with vo.wp; the reason given -- ultimately, too many bot-created stubs -- is not one of the principled reasons for outside interference in other projects; and a dangerous precedent is created). Would you think this is enough to make the proposal unacceptable? --Smeira 12:43, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Maybe. There are many other proposals to close wikis. Do they violate the wiki-autonomy? No: There are wiki which have no content except spam or maybe two or three content pages in the wiki's language - there no autonomy is violated. These wikis are just crap, junk, rubbish, whatever. Therefore they should be closed (like ru-sib also had a community but was crap). Now some people think the Volapük Wikipedia is also crap, so in their opinion this proposal is acceptable. --MF-Warburg 14:13, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Well, some people (Certh) think that the Polish Wikipedia also contains lots of rubbish, crap, junk, whatever. In Certh's eyes, and probably others too, this should make Certh's proposal for a radical cleanup in the Polish Wikipedia acceptable. Yet it was immediately closed and archived. I suppose the difference is the number of people who have bad thoughts about the Volapük Wikipedia? Or is there something else? --Smeira 03:20, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

The feasibility of moving vo.wp to the Incubator

For clarity (I thought this is obvious). I proposed moving vo.wikipedia to the incubator after all minor bot generated articles were deleted. I hope this adresses your worries. Furthermore on database access level sever admins can do much more than you'd imagine. It is just a MySQL database with very powerful possiblities of manipulation. Arnomane 17:38, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Not really. I think you don't realize how many articles there will be after a "bot-generated minor articles" deletion and are just speculating. And who will do the task of selecting (criteria?) articles on a one-by-one basis? MF-Warburg didn't say anything about direct database manipulation. I believe that is not a standard procedure. And is it actually easy? MF-Warburg, could you please comment? Anyway, as MF-Warburg also said above, moving to Incubator is closing. Malafaya 17:44, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Well, let's get a few numbers. This should help us see if Arnomane's proposal is feasible. (And note: if Arnomane had started a discussion in vo.wp before coming here, s/he would have seen these numbers before and could have thought about them.) The articles/stubs that existed before I started uploading city stubs to vo.wp were: vo:Klad:Volapükans (about 1,450 members); vo:Klad:Volapükagaseds (about 50); vo:Klad:Volapükaklubs (about 250); vo:Klad:Läns (about 190), and a few minor ones I forget. There are also article/stubs created during the higher bot activity period, but which were human-created and have developed further; this includes: vo:Klad:Stels (about 8), vo:Klad:Dinosaurs (about 150 + another 5-10 in vo:Nims rujenavik which are not in the dinosaur category); there are also the articles in vo:Klad:Yegeds no pefipenöls (= articles to be improved; about 50) and in vo:Klad:Yegeds vipabik (= desirable articles, based on the List of articles from Meta; about 100). So: 1450 + 50 + 250 + 190 + 8 + 155 + 50 + 100 = 2250 more or less. (The vo:Klad:Telplänovapads has more than 2000, mostly also human-made, but since they're mostly disambiguation pages between city stubs that Arnomane would delete, I assume they would also be deleted as useless. They do, however, show how much work has been put into vo.wp already.) Since among the city stubs there are also many that were human-made, we could add, say, another 250 and get 2500. (Did I forget anything, Malafaya, HannesM?) So now we can ask MF-Warburg: is it feasible to transfer a project with about 2500 pages to the Incubator? --Smeira 20:41, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Yes. It might not be reasonable (zumutbar) to do it via this process, but it's possible. But, about moving via the database: The tables incubatorwiki.page and vowiki.page (or however the databases are called) have to be joined. This can cause problems: 1) Every page on Incubator which belongs to a so-called test-language there has to be prefixed. If that is possible to prefix that pages in the database before joining the tables, there's still another thing: 2) The user pages (and maybe other namespaces) from vo: should not be moved. If it's possible just to join them to incubatorwiki.page, the last thing: 3) This will be a lot of work. I'm sure the developers have to do more important work than joining wikis. I'm sure incubator:I:Importing is possible, but I'm not sure at the database-method. But it's possible, 2500 pages are still OK, although it will take a lot of time. --MF-Warburg 21:03, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

OK, that settles this question. Thanks, MF-Warburg! --Smeira 03:52, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Hmmm, most of the "desired articles" are of enough good quality, I believe. But anyway we are talking of some 100 pages. And what about the American cities pages? They are not stubs, just bot generated and many actually edited by humans after that. Won't they be included? Malafaya 13:37, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Now, two different questions to MF-Warburg: you mention that, though feasible, moving the reduced vo.wp to the incubator would be a difficult task and take a lot time away from project developers who have better things to do than matching tables. In your opinion, is this sufficient reason to make moving vo.wp to the Incubator a bad idea -- rather than leaving it where it is (reduced or not)? Now, another question: suppose the (reduced) Volapük Wikipedia is moved to the Incubator. What are the criteria for deciding when a project can leave the Incubator? And could it be that the (reduced) Volapük Wikipedia already satisfies these criteria and would then be immediately moved out after being moved in (thus generating yet more work for the developers)? --Smeira 12:40, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

A project leaves Incubator when it has been approved by the Langcom after a successful request, which requires a translated interface, an ISO code, a good test project (on Incubator) and contributors (native speakers). Since Volapük Wikipedia meets all this criteria, it would be useless to move it to Incubator. But if this were done, you could make a request for a "new" vo.wp, which the langcom could REJECT because Volapük has no native speakers, but this is confusing with invented languages. About "bad idea": It is a bad idea to move so many pages. --MF-Warburg 14:02, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Probably ang:, cu:, got:, ia:, ie:, io:, jbo: and nov: Wikipedia have no native speakers either (there could be others too). And there isn't native speakers for the other wikis of these languages either (Ido Wiktionary has more articles than vo.wikipedia).

The prospect of having to import all the other wikis with no native speakers to the Incubator could make even the most dedicated Incubator editor lose interest in further work on that very useful project. The chances that there will ever be (enough) users that have those languages as their first language are slim, and the chance that the wikis will be forever stuck in Incubator is large. --Jorunn 15:42, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

All those arguments make the move-to-incubator look like a bad idea already. Also, if Malafaya is right and the American city stubs would be deemed (even by Arnomane) as 'good enough' to be kept, then there would be another 20 000 pages to move to the Incubator -- this would probably make it technically impossible again. So: do we all agree now that the "move-to-incubator" part of the proposal must be dropped? --Smeira 03:25, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

A parallel discussion

During the night, User:Leptictidium and I have had an interesting exchange of ideas about this proposal and various claims made on it. Since it was quite lengthy, it seemed better to leave it where it was (our talk pages) rather than tranfer it here. If you're interested, look at my talk page first for Leptictidium's comments, and then at Leptictidium's talk page for my reactions. --Smeira 03:52, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for destryoing this debate and then noticing that it is too long and then starting in parallel. Arnomane 11:22, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

The exchange outside of this page was Leptictidium's idea, not mine; s/he was the first to write something on my talk page. You should thank him/her, if there's anything to thank for. And I am merely posting a link to it for anyone who's interested in arguments; how does that destroy the debate? --Smeira 11:49, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

You noticed that this discussion here is too long and you suggested that this parallel discussion maybe is better because this here is overcrowded. You wrote the most text here. But probably you asking now the next question how I can get this impression (as usual). Arnomane 13:58, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Arnomane; please notice that I (supporter of the proposal) and Smeira (against the proposal) were just discussing our own points of view on all this, and not actually starting a new discussion. I think Smeira only linked to it because he thought it might be interesting for some people to have a look at how we evaluated some of the arguments used in here, both for and against the proposal. -- Leptictidium 14:20, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

@Arnomane: it's obvious how you got your impression: I am indeed one of the major contributors to this debate, my comments have indeed increased the size of the page a lot. It's a true impression. What I don't understand is how this destroys the debate. Other people seem to be able to follow what I say and react accordingly; you claim you can't, because "the page is too long". I've already offered to help you with anything that you find difficult to follow -- I can even explain it on your talk page if you don't want to make this page even longer. What else can I say? --Smeira 12:19, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

I apologize for not beeing clear enough. I didn't want to critise anybody but Smeira with that. Arnomane 20:37, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Hm, since Leptictidium began the conversation and was the one who suggested moving it all here (I suggested the links instead), your apology doesn't sound very logical. The 'parallel discussion', as you call it, has two sides. If you criticize me for answering, you must also criticize Leptictidium for asking. --Smeira 03:32, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

On a more constructive level: I really like your summary and I haven't answered to quite some comments here, cause I think it is not good if I try to find every answer on my own and I am convinced there are people that are smarter than me. ;-) Arnomane 01:10, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Also on a constructive level: don't forget to look at my answers. Also notice how they affected Leptictidium's points; and check also my own second reaction to his modified points. I agree Leptictidium is doing a good job; that's exactly what I was asking you (or anyone else) to do. It improves the level of the debate tremendously. --Smeira 03:32, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Arnomane, your unnecessary rudeness is destructive. Someone trying to save your work isn't. 555 14:23, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

New external link: position on bot articles

In Arnomane's blog, I have given a clear definition of my position with respect to bot-stubs, whether they are good or bad, and I've also answered some criticisms of my position and some misunderstandings. Since such criticisms play an important role in the discussion here, I thought they would be relevant, but I didn't see where to put them here, so I decided to just put the link here for those who are interested: [[6]] (scroll down to the fourth (currently the last) post). DISCLAIMER: No, I'm not trying to destroy this discussion (how could I?), I'm not starting a parallel discussion (it's Arnomane's blog, not mine), I'm not suggesting that we all go discuss over there (why would I do that? just check what I wrote there if you're interested, then come back and continue debating on this page). --Smeira 21:24, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Two questions

I have two questions. - Hillgentleman 17:25, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

Accuracy of the articles

This question is to S. Meira: 1. How can you guarentee the accuracy of the information in the thousands of stubs? In particular, since the demoraphic data of any town are changing all the time, how do you keep them up to date? - Hillgentleman 17:25, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

What is wikipedia?

2. Folks, What is wikipedia? What is it for? In this context, what do you mean when you say something is good or bad for wikipedia? - Hillgentleman 17:25, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

My thoughts

I have been considering the Volapük situation on and off for quite some time, and I have a few thoughts now. Just to be clear, I do not think it is within my rights to make any sort of declaration about this, and so my comments should be considered merely those of someone who has been around for a long time here and thought about a lot of different aspects of these kinds of issues, considered both from the perspective of local users of a language project as well as from the perspective of the good of the project as a whole.

My first thought is: what is the purpose of Volapük Wikipedia?

According to English Wikipedia, there are around 20 or 30 speakers of this constructed language worldwide. I think this is an important fact which ought to inform our thinking about how such a project should best be managed. Therefore, no one needs this encyclopedia in order to have a free encyclopedia "in their own language"... our fundamental mission. If we were discussing a language with 300 million speakers and virtually no articles in Wikipedia, I think we might tend to be quite tolerant of bot-generated articles as a way to "kick start" the project... i.e. to make a big bunch of articles to draw the attention and interest of speakers of that language who might help make a real project of it.

In this case, though, there are no speakers who need this in order to learn about the world. There is no one who can only understand Volapük. Indeed, I would venture to guess that all existing Volapük users are fluent in either English or German... or, often, both. So if these people need to know about Cleveland, Ohio, they will likely use English Wikipedia or German Wikipedia or another Wikipedia... the Wikipedia of their mother tongue.

Does that mean that Volapük Wikipedia has no purpose, or that it is worthless? I do not think so. If those 20-30 people, or any 5-10 of them, take an interest in the language and would be interested in working on a Wikipedia in that language, then I think that's a fine project. But why? Why would they want to do this? Likely for the sheer joy of creating in the language, of sharing a hobby with friends, etc. And I would argue, then, that bot-generated articles actually detract from that mission, the mission of learning the language, the mission of having fun with friends building new articles in the language.

Therefore, I would recommend that we recognize that the primary purpose of Volapük Wikipedia is not the abstract "reader" who we concern ourselves with in most languages, but rather the primary purpose is to serve the needs of "writers"... learners of the language.

My recommendation, then, is that all the bot-generated articles be deleted, and that Volapük Wikipedia authors proudly and with joy work to create articles in the old-fashioned human way... helping each other with grammar, with interesting langauge questions, and with content that is of interest to the users.

And I see no particular reason to move Volapük Wikipedia to the incubator, although I would like to stress here that I am not taking a position that it should not move there either. I just don't see it as a big point either way.

To be transparent about a possible personal bias of mine: I often use our lists of wikipedias ranked by article count in public lectures. I do not think it is valid for me to include Volapük or any other primarily-bot-written constructed-language wikipedia in those listings. And so I support, whatever else might be decided here, that Volapük Wikipedia be barred from those lists so long as it exists primarily as bot-generated articles.

I hope that my thoughts here are useful to someone, and I wish everyone well.--Jimbo Wales 01:42, 1 January 2008 (UTC)