For example, in the Chinese Wikipedia community, there are current discussions talking about the current ranking of Chinese Wikipedia in terms of number of articles, and how the *neighboring* versions (those who have similar numbers of articles) use bots to generate new articles.

# The stats report generated and used by the Chinese community to compare itself against neighboring language versions: 

#* Link 

#* Google translated 

# One current discussion: 

#* Link

#* Google translated

# One recently archived discussion:

#* Link

#* Google translated

To counterbalance the situation of such nonsensical comparison and competition, I personally think it is better to have an altmetric in place of the crude (and often distorting) measure of the number of articles. 

One would expect a better encyclopedia to contain a set of core articles of human knowledge. 

Indeed the meta has a list of 1000 articles that "every Wikipedia should have". http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_articles_every_Wikipedia_should_have

We can use this to generate a quantifiable metric of the development of the core articles in each language version, perhaps using the following numbers:

* number of references (total and per article)

* number of footnotes (total and per article)

* number of citations (total and per article)

* number of distinct wiki internal links to other articles

* number of good and feature articles (judged by each language version community)

Based on the above numbers, it is conceivable to come up with a metric that measure both the depth and breadth of the quality of the core articles. I admit that other measurements can and should be applied, but still the above numbers have the following merits:

* they reflect the nature of Wikipedia as dependent on other reliable secondary and primary information couces.

* they can be applied across languages automatically without the need to analyze texts, which requires more tools and engenders issues of comparability.

For the sake of simplicity, let us say that one language version (possibly English or German) has the highest number of scores, then that language version can then be served as baseline for comparison. Say this benchmark language version has:

# the quality-metric number of QUAL (from the vital 1000)

# the quantity number of total articles QUAN (from the existing metric)

Then the "do-not-spread-oneself-too-thin" quality metric can be calculated as:

QUAL/QUAN

(It can be further discussed whether logarithmic scales should be applied here.)

The gist of this "quality metric" is to reverse the obsession with the number of articles towards the important core articles, hoping to get more references, footnotes, citations, internal links and good/feature articles for the core 1000. It will hopefully indicate which language version is too "watery", or simply spreading oneself too thin with inconsequential short articles.

 

Let us have a discussion here [Wiki-research-l], before we extend the conversation to [Wikimedia-i].

han-teng liao