[WikiEN-l] Positives to publicity

[Carcharoth]

On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 4:34 PM, Jussi-Ville
Heiskanen<cimonavaro at gmail.com> wrote:
> FT2 wrote:
>> The reason for this is, when Flagged Revisions got into the press last week,
>> a number of sources reported that Wikipedia would be recruiting 20,000
>> "unpaid expert editors" as staff to check the articles....
>>
>
> I am actually curious as to where precisely did they pull that
> particular figure of 20 000 from. It looks awfully specific, like
> somebody might have actually used that number in some
> context or another, and the media just completely fumbled
> at understanding what the number referred to.

I agree. It looks like a figure for number of core active editors:

"...the plan is to draft in our core of active editors, all 20,000 of
them, and keep the backlog on flagged revisions down to ensure the
delays are minimal..."

might have become:

"...Wikipedia want 20,000 new editors to join..."

[We do want this, but not with the wrong impressions]

I can see how something like that could have happened.

Carcharoth