2008/7/29 Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net>et>: And what exactly is our bottom line? In any case I can find examples where the oposite is the case (Amazon would be the classic example). Numbers may be crude measures but if people enjoy counting them why stop them? If people like creating large numbers of stubs why stop them? If people like doing large numbers of micro edits why stop them? They are rather useful for things like spelling and formatting. Not everyone is good at adding content. Not everyone is good at research and those that are and enjoy doing it are unlikely to be concerned by talk about numbers because they are intelligent enough to realize that it isn't a good measure for them. Equally when you want to concentrate on improving one article wikipedia's size comes in very handy. You really realise this when you discover it isn't big enough. I was expanding our [[canal]] article today and I wanted to mention back pumping. I don't however want to stop and explain what it is so I rely on us having an article on the subject except we don't so either I've got to go and write an article on that subject or I've got to include a digression in the canal article to explain just what I'm talking about. Wikipedia being larger would facilitate the writing of a core article in this case. And for those who don't want to measure by articles or edits. We have featured articles various article grading systems DYK or a selection of barnstars. Our featured content is given a much higher profile than our lists of editors by edit count. For those who work on images we have featured images, quality images and valued images (or you can count how many other projects your image has been used on) For refs there are at the moment I think only barnstars You claim of obsession with posts is highly questionable. Appearing at the top of the monthly list is mostly a hint to reduce your post rate. The claim that wikipedia is obsessed with quantity over quality doesn't really hold up under close examination. -- geni

geni wrote: editors by edit count. Indeed. And rightly so - star articles matter more to the project than putative "star editors". Which is why I regret attempts to leverage FA and DYK into a surrogate for a star system. One of the nice things about Wikipedia editing is that there are many ways to be a "star" measured by self-esteem. One can be a star merger of articles and know it, without having to have that on any list. By the way, "bigger" is fundamentally good. It's a point about databases I learned elsewere : "you can look stuff up here" is a bit dull, but a database generous enough that you start searching it in ways new to you becomes a friend. Charles