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Report from the Hungarian Wikipedia

By NCurse, 18 September 2006

Status and community news

As of Monday, 10 September 2006, the Hungarian language Wikipedia contains about 39 378 articles, so it is the 20th biggest Wikipedia. Of these, 72 articles (approximately 1 in 550) are considered Kiemelt szócikk ("Featured article"). Hungarian Wikipedia has no equivalent of the good articles page of the English or the Lesenswerte Artikel of the German Wikipedia yet. In addition, in the Hungarian Wikipedia articles must go through another voting process to be featured on the Main Page.

The latest three additions to the list of featured articles are: Mamut (Mammoth), Antiochia (Antioch) and Carl Friedrich Gauss (Carl Friedrich Gauss).

As of 18 September, 2006, 9 users of the Hungarian Wikipedia are administrators. All of them are male and the majority has a technical background. Sysops make 0.1% of users out of a total number of 8 411 registered users and about 14% of the very active (100+ edits / month) contributors.

Since September 2005, when it counted 16,000 articles, Hungarian Wikipedia's article growth index has been 250%.

A featured images page has been recently created. Selected noteworthy images from the Hungarian Wikipedia are displayed below:

Grand Market Hall, Budapest	Parliament building in Budapest	Parliament building	Szinva Terrace, Miskolc
Váci utca in Christmas decoration at Budapest	Park of Hungarian Turkish Friendship, Szigetvár	City of Debrecen	City of Sopron

Wiki Meeting

The Hungarian Wikipedia community held its fourth meeting on the February 11th, 2006 in the city of Debrecen. (Previous meetings were held in Miskolc and Budapest.) The two main outcomes were: the creation of the substub template (maintained by a bot) and the introduction of Maintenance Week, when we focus on specific backlogs.

About substubs

Earlier a considerable part of the activity on the Hungarian VfD page consisted of voting on deletion of substub articles (mostly unanimously), which were not valid candidates for speedy deletion, but no-one really questioned their uselessness, either.

After some debate a major simplification of cleanup of this kind of pages was introduced. Whenever an editor encounters a page which is considered a substub, it is marked with a special template. The articles marked with this template are collected every hour by a bot, which timestamps them and also lists them on a page sorted by date. In addition, the bot prepares a another template, which sorts substubs in three groups: those which have been marked with the substub template for at least five days and thus can be deleted immediately, and those which will reach this state in one or two days, respectively.

Voting is avoided with the following reasoning. If an article is marked as a substub, there is obviously at least one editor voting to delete it. And if someone would vote against its deletion within five days, they would either improve it and remove the substub tag, or promote it to voting by replacing the substub tag with the VfD tag.

After several months of use, most substubs are deleted without any debate, some are saved from deletion by their expansion, and only a few need to be voted on. As a consequence, polls on the VfD page have become less frequent and more meaningful.

Statistics

In the media

Articles about Wikipedia have been featured in many prominent news outlets, including one of the most popular web portals and newspapers^[1]. It has become a common practice that relevant Wikipedia pages are quoted in news articles about different subjects like: sects, celebrities or political figures.

In a recent example the special issue of a popular Hungarian newspaper, Népszabadság titled "The 100 Most Influential Hungarians" copied a substantial section from a biographical article of a film director without referencing (acknowledging ?) Wikipedia. Once notified, the editors of Népszabadság turned out to be cooperative in the matter, but after dicussions on the Wikipedia village pump, the issue made it to the front page of Hungary's leading web portal. ^{[2] [3]}

Recently the news magazine HVG, "the Hungarian Economist" also featured an opinion piece in its online edition about the political debates among Hungarian Wikipedia editors on the discussion pages.^[4]

Sister projects

Hungarian Wikibooks is 9th among other similar projects with 950 articles; Wiktionary is 10th with 27200 articles; Wikiquote is 19th with 400 collections. Wikisource has recently been created.

References