On 5/5/06, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:
This approach I don't agree with. Everytime we cite the fact that Wikipedia has 1,000,000 articles, we ascribe value to each of those articles. Every time we allow crud that we would be ashamed to speak of to remain in the article, we diminish the value of those articles.
Hmm. I'd doubt many people in the world believe we've reached a million articles without handling a lot of trivia. Do you really think that anyone would be surprised by the fact that a good portion of that million are on such subjects?
For exactly the same reason I think it is very poor for us to have 900,000 (or more?) inactive user accounts. They don't harm us directly
- but they do vastly misrepresent the actual state of the project.
I don't think we tend to boast about our numbers of user accounts, do we? User accounts unused for <x> months and with no undeleted contributions should be pruned though, I think, simply from a manageability point of view.
I've noticed people mentioning our active user count and our admin count more often than the total.
-Matt