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Bulgarian Wikipedia is a Bulgarian Language edition of Wikipedia . On November 24 , 2005 , the Bulgarian language Wikipedia added its 20,000th article, which made it the 21st biggest Wikipedia. As of April 26, 2006 the Bulgarian Wikipedia had 25,151 articles. CURRENT PROBLEMS IN GROWTH The Bulgarian Wikipedia is among the ones with slowest growth in the last few months and still slowing down. The total number of active (100+ edits) contributors has fallen to just 10 with the number of new Wikipedians actually falling. The total number of articles is rising at a rate of some 4.5% a month with the result that the Bulgarian Wikipedia has lost its status in the chart of large Wikipedias. Furthermore, the number of articles over 2 KB in size is probably under 3,000. All these statistics tell of a deepening problem with growth. The reasons and the consequences of the slowdown are not known. A probable reason is the inadequate press coverage, a practically inexistent word-of-mouth and the total lack of public events. These can be summed under "bad PR". An effort to popularize the second birthday of the project ( December 6 , 2005 ) in the media might create a new wave of interest, so much needed also as a stimulus for the current contributors. The landmark 20,000th article in the encyclopedia ( November 24 , 2005 ) might also encourage Internet users to make their first contact with the project. Interest from some of the country's biggest newspapers has been shown already in the past weeks (e.g. Trud and Dnevnik ), but they usually focus on the English language website instead of the one in native Bulgarian. Reasons for the lack of popularity of the Bulgarian Wikipedia could also be sought exogenously, in the Bulgarian society as a whole. In terms of technology, the country is among the ones with the least Internet penetration in Europe; indeed, the growth numbers are encouraging, but they don't usually suggest that as many Bulgarians will be soon connected to the WWW as fellow Europeans. On the other hand, teachers and instructors in higher education don't seem to encourage the use of Wikipedia as much as this happens abroad. The reason is probably that they don't know about it, which arguably should turn our attention back to PR efforts. Lastly, we could look into the government's inadequate IT+education projects (e.g. iClass and related initiatives) and the lack of support for open-source software as possible exogenous barriers to the desired levels of development for projects like the Bulgarian Wikipedia. Again, this last problem could be seen as a result of little "advertising" effort by the Wikipedia contributors themselves. The slow growth of the Bulgarian Wikipedia is an alarming anomaly that casts doubt over the future of the project. Furthermore, many problems from outside Wikipedia and in the nation as a whole make bg.Wikipedia's outlooks for the future even darker. This doesn't mean, though, that the small community of editors is not putting significant new efforts into securing press coverage, for example. The results of recent initiatives and ones coming in the near future remains to be seen in December 2005 and the first couple of months of 2006. EXTERNAL LINKS |
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