Waray Wikipedia Explained

Waray Wikipedia
Commercial:	No
Location:	Miami, Florida
Type:	Internet encyclopedia project
Language:	Waray
Registration:	Optional
Owner:	Wikimedia Foundation

The Waray Wikipedia is the Waray language edition of Wikipedia. It is hosted on servers run by the Wikimedia Foundation since September 25, 2005.^[1] As of,, this edition has articles^[2] and is the largest Wikipedia edition.^[3] The Waray Wikipedia has very few active users, and instead owes its large size to automatically generated articles created by bots, most of them by Sverker Johansson's Lsjbot.^{[4] [5] [6]}

Waray (or Waray-Waray) is spoken by approximately 3.6 million^[7] people in the Eastern Visayas region of the Philippines.

History

The Waray Wikipedia was first organized in Tacloban on September 25, 2005, by Harvey Fiji.^[8] The wiki had a small number of contributors, with fewer than ten editors per month until April 2009. The first meet-up of editors took place in January 2013 in Tacloban.^[9]

By early 2011 the Waray Wikipedia had attracted notice for including more than twice as many articles as the Tagalog Wikipedia, which is based on the principal language of the Philippines. This discrepancy was explained by the very large number of articles added automatically by bots, with no direct human input.^{[10] [11]} By early June 2014 the Waray Wikipedia had attained a very high article count of 1 million, but a very low article depth of less than 3. Article depth is an attempt to measure the collaborative quality of articles, based on the number of edits per article.

According to automatically updated Wikimedia data, as of,, the Waray Wikipedia has pages (including user pages, help pages, etc.), active users, and total edits. The article depth of Waray Wikipedia is —a rough indicator of the article's collaborative quality—compared to for the Tagalog Wikipedia. (Waray and Tagalog are related languages belonging to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family.)

However, Waray Wikipedia does not appear to be widely used in the Philippines; as of March 2021, 90% of Wikipedia views from that country were directed at English Wikipedia, with 5% going to Tagalog and 3%, to Russian Wikipedia.^[12] About 35% of Waray Wikipedia views come from China, 25% from the United States, about 15% from Germany and France, and less than 8% from the Philippines.^[13]

Milestones

• On August 26, 2010, the Waray Wikipedia passed the 100,000-article milestone, making it the 35th largest language edition at that time.
• On June 8, 2014, the encyclopedia passed the 1 million article mark, which was mostly made by Lsjbot.^[14] It was the very first Wikipedia for a language in the Philippines and Asia that reached 1 million articles.^[15]

Further reading

• Joseph F.. Ballesteros. Belinda T.. Bernas-Ballesteros. Michael Glen U.. Ong. Disseminating Information Using an Indigenous Language – the Waray Wikipedia Experience. Aboriginal Education World. National Chengchi University. 91. 82. February 2020. - Originally written in English, it includes a Mandarin Chinese translation (titled "族語傳遞資訊──瓦萊語維基百科經驗談") by Chen Yingrou (陳穎柔).

External links

• Meetup page of Waray Wikipedia
• Milestones of the Waray Wikipedia
• Waray Wikipedia mobile version
• Improving Wikimedia Projects Content through Collaboration - Waray Wikipedia Experience, 2014-2017

Notes and References

1. Web site: Start of the Waray Wikipedia . War.wikipedia.org . September 25, 2005.
2. Web site: [{{fullurl:war:Pinaurog:Mga Estadistika}} Mga Estadistika ]. War.wikipedia.org . January 31, 2016.
3. [:meta:List of Wikipedias|List of Wikipedias]
4. https://www.wsj.com/articles/for-this-author-10-000-wikipedia-articles-is-a-good-days-work-1405305001 For This Author, 10,000 Wikipedia Articles is a Good Day's Work - WSJ
5. http://www.norwegian.com/magazine/features/2014/09/the-worlds-most-prolific-writer The world's most prolific writer - Features – N by Norwegian
6. Web site: Hans robot har skrivit halva Wikipedia - Internetworld . February 9, 2015 . August 29, 2017 . https://web.archive.org/web/20170829170532/https://internetworld.idg.se/2.1006/1.569118/hans-robot-har-skrivit-halva-wikipedia . dead .
7. Web site: Waray. Ethnologue. Summer Institute of Linguistics. January 5, 2017.
8. Web site: Locsin . Joel . 2014-06-10 . Waray Wikipedia hits 1 million articles . 2023-09-25 . GMA News Online . en.
9. Web site: Wikipedia Statistics Waray . Stats.wikimedia.org . January 31, 2016.
10. Web site: The Linguistic Geography of the Wikipedia . Martin W. Lewis . GeoCurrents.info . April 18, 2011.
11. Meet the Stats Master Making Sense of Wikipedia's Massive Data Trove . Ashik . Siddique . Wired . December 27, 2013.
12. Web site: Wikimedia Traffic Analysis Report - Wikipedia Page Views Per Country - Breakdown. March 8, 2021. stats.wikimedia.org.
13. Web site: Wikimedia Traffic Analysis Report - Page Views Per Wikipedia Language - Breakdown. March 8, 2021. stats.wikimedia.org.
14. Web site: Locsin . Joel . June 10, 2014 . Waray Wikipedia hits 1 million articles . dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20200807085757/https://sg.news.yahoo.com/waray-wikipedia-hits-1-million-articles-033443741.html . August 7, 2020 . March 2, 2016 . Yahoo News Philippines.
15. Web site: https://web.archive.org/web/20160310100327/http://www.philstar.com/cebu-lifestyle/2015/08/05/1484749/virtual-pool-free-knowledge-eastern-visayas. A Virtual Pool of Free Knowledge on Eastern Visayas. The Freeman. The Philippine Star. March 10, 2016. August 5, 2015. Nazareno. Eileen. July 24, 2019. bot: unknown.