Directory:Akahele/Ten new Wikipedia articles

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

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

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

An article about an American professional wrestler. This page has about 75 other Wikipedia articles linking to it, because pages about pro wrestlers are a very prolific and important component of Wikipedia's effort to document all things related to fan-based culture. The new article has been getting about 300 page views per day, by far the most popular of these 10 new articles. It was authored by Richard "Wrestler" Lopez, who <a title="Richard's autobiographical sketch" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Richard_%22Wrestler%22_Lopez&oldid=316721253#1999-2008:_Wrestling_Journals" target="_blank">claims</a> to be a retired professional wrestler and now a "wrestling journalist" by dint of his past work for a failed magazine, which led to a job as a waiter, which led to his opening a Blogger account. As you read this self-written tale of Lopez, you begin to take more interest in his life story than that of his subject, Jesse Neal. Another characteristic of Wikipedia -- the drama of the editors often outweighs the story in situ.

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

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

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

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

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

A fairly extensive biography about an Israeli politician. Unfortunately, he is about 150 times less interesting to readers than the article about the pro wrestler, as Coren's article obtains <a title="Traffic stats for Yitzhak Coren" href="http://stats.grok.se/en/200909/Yitzhak_Coren" target="_blank">about 2 page views per day</a>.

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

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

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

The rundown

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

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

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

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

One thing is clear. With over 3 million articles in place on the English Wikipedia, the heady days of "help us build the encyclopedia, create the article you were looking for" are well bygone. Another thing is fairly clear. The <a title="Traffic stats for Line management" href="http://stats.grok.se/en/200909/Line_management" target="_blank">articles</a> that I <a title="Traffic stats for Job sharing" href="http://stats.grok.se/en/200909/Job%20sharing" target="_blank">personally</a> created <a title="Traffic stats for Robert Half International" href="http://stats.grok.se/en/200909/Robert%20Half%20International" target="_blank">recently</a> seem to serve more people's needs than at least 80%-90% of Wikipedia's other new articles. But, now that I've been blocked from editing Wikipedia, the encyclopedia won't be getting any more such useful, well-written articles from me.

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