What a lot of churn. So the overall rate was merely +1 FA, +4 FL (and also 3 topics and three images). Is it always this bad?

There are long-term stats somewhere, and they could be updated if you asked. I suggest identifying which of the featured areas you want to see long-term stats for, and asking at the relevant talk pages. An approximation to these stats could be obtained by going through the Signpost summaries.

From: "Steve Bennett" <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Sent: Monday, 13 July, 2009 03:29:06 GMT +00:00 GMT Britain, Ireland, Portugal Subject: [WikiEN-l] Featured churn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-07-06/Featur… I couldn't help but notice: * Five articles were promoted to featured status this week * Four articles were delisted this week. * Twelve lists were promoted to featured status this week * Eight lists were delisted this week

wrote:

I often wondered - what's the point of delisting? Surely if a previous version of an article was good enough to be Featured, if the current version isn't, you should just restore the one that was? Or am I missing something? Andrew

Here's a great example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_picture_candidates/Face_of_… What an incredible image. This is a *wasp*, and we have great detail of the *hairs* on its forehead. Stunning sharpness, and this photo would not be out of place in a good science magazine. Yet two editors managed to oppose its promotion to "featured" on the basis of the tip of one antenna being obscured by an out of focus leaf fragment. Another, neutral, came up with "An amazing detail and sharpness...with a clumsy framing and cropping ruining an otherwise excellent picture. ... I will not support the promotion as I find little excuse for those flaws." These would be perfectly apt comments if we were voting on National Geographic's "photo of the year". But Wikipedia "featured picture"? Whee.

On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 9:02 PM, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote:. You should ask Durova about featured image reviews - she had a live one not long ago. Photograph of a moon (Eros perhaps?) that was the best that anyone could possibly take with current (government) technology, but it was opposed for reasons more suited to critiquing everyday items in posed situations. Nathan

----- "Steve Bennett" <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote: Does that mean we should have the same process for "delisting" admins - not really fair that candidates today are held to a higher standard than candidates who got through three years ago!

Kat Walsh wrote: Yes, in a way it's sad we have so much attention on gatekeeping and absolute standards (well, as has been said, high and upwardly mobile standards), and so little recognition on great added-value edits, the ones which take an article into a different class of usefulness. As far as I know the transition from B class to A class is still considered to be the most transforming, from the reader's point of view.

I think you're probably right that a new departure needs to be made: we're at best mediocre at devising new "recognition mechanisms". How about a project aimed (since we are coming up to three million articles) at shifting the balance of stubs and other really substandard articles before we get to four million?  We'll get to the end of the first decade of WP in 2011 before that happens. And I think we need some kind of two-dimensional plot, not single scale: urgency assessment as well as quality assessment.

I do spend more time on upgrading stubs than I used to, and I guess this will be true of anyone who is driven by what they find on the site. When we last discussed total article numbers, four million seemed a good enough guess for the "plateau".

Charles

It's looking to me like 3.5 million is about the plateau, since the curve is bang on that, but we might make 4 million *eventually*. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Modelling_Wikipedia%27s_growth#Logis…

2009/7/14 Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com>om>: Redlinks in general perhaps. Redlinks in articles a significant number of people actually read less so.

-- geni _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

I don't see any evidence for an asymptote at all yet. We're only about ~1300 per day now, and the trend is clearly downwards, on a *log* graph of *percentage* growth against time it's a straightish line downwards, and the size of the wiki seems to be plateauing; percentage growth is a quarter what it was two years ago, and the wiki is only 1/3 bigger. IMO we're probably going to be under a 1000 per day by Christmas. If we do manage 4 million I don't think it will be in the next 4 years.

Are you saying the numbers could go negative?? Contraction in real-terms? :-/ Carcharoth

2009/7/14 Carcharoth <carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com>om>: It's happened at least once. Long term it would be unlikely since most deletions are of new articles.

On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 5:00 PM, geni<geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote: Was it when all those algae articles got deleted?

Redlinks in general perhaps. Redlinks in articles a significant number of people actually read less so.

Redlinks are likely to be a poor estimate of numbers of "missing" articles anyway. Some will be to articles that would be non-notable, and redlinks tend to be removed - in other words links that would be present if we had the article aren't there as redlinks.

sineWAVE wrote: Who are these people removing redlinks? They need a slap. Charles

On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 5:06 PM, Carcharoth<carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com> wrote:

> Maybe it is time for another comedy scene depicting the first day of > the wiki and the nascent conflict between deletionism and > inclusionism?

On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 12:38 PM, Carcharoth<carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com> wrote: Maybe you were thinking of the sinister Deletionist Cabal in _Wikipedia The Movie_? https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/User:Raul654/Wikipedia_the_M…

RfA is supposed to be purely a risk management exercise: we subject prospective admins to a couple of tests to reduce our risk that they go feral.

It used to be. These days people go through your contributions with a fine toothed comb to make sure you've never mistagged a CSD, called a spade a spade or spelt "opportunity" with an 'e'.

On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 9:02 PM, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote:. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_picture_candidates/Face_of_… You should ask Durova about featured image reviews - she had a live one not long ago. Photograph of a moon (Eros perhaps?) that was the best that anyone could possibly take with current (government) technology, but it was opposed for reasons more suited to critiquing everyday items in posed situations. Nathan _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 5:06 AM, Andrew Gray<andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk> wrote: direction; articles with a couple of paragraphs of text, a reference IMHO, this kind of thing is one of Wikipedia's greatest failings. We still can't even agree on a definition of things like "stub", and it seems to be in everyone's interest not to. People like stuff like that being subjective. (FWIW, I think it's reasonable to have "stub" be relative to the expected content. Two paragraphs on a country would clearly be a "stub". Two paragraphs on an obscure medieval scribe might be the most comprehensive resource possible.)

On 14/07/2009, Sage Ross <ragesoss+wikipedia(a)gmail.com> wrote: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Enwikipediagrowth.PNG We're already down to 1000/day growth on the unsmoothed graph as we fall off one of the two biannual growth peaks. Looks like the Wikipedia is still bang-on for 3.5 million articles.

As long as history doesn't come to an end, and new people keep getting born and (annoyingly) becoming notable enough for a Wikipedia article, there will always be a need for new articles.

Bod Notbod wrote: Yes. To be tedious and pedantic about it all, once we have finished Phase 1 of enWP, where we were playing catch-up with the obviously encyclopedic topics like chemical elements and US Presidents (etc.), we get to Phase 2, where the new articles fall into several distinct classes: (1) articles about newly notable topics; (2) articles about fairly obviously encyclopedic topics, for which sources were available without too much trouble and which fit into existing coverage, but had been missed for whatever reason; (3) articles which are much like those in (2) to create, but only came to light after someone expanded existing coverage somewhere (new redlinks); (4) articles for redlinks where the supporting sources took a bit of quarrying out. So we are really saying that (1) is generally speaking the 'reactive' class. To some extent the rate of creation is not under "our" control (these articles will be started in some form anyway). The others are the 'proactive' classes: (2) really just requires people to read the site and notice places where redlinks are or should be, and create good stubs that are not a huge effort (the traditional form of growth). (3) requires upgrading stubs to generate fuller coverage, and then we are back to (2). While (4) takes us back to the "librarian" discussion: deeper-cutting research skills required. (There is really also (5), completism for lists, which gets through to me, but perhaps is a minority interest.) So what we get is a rate of growth by the article-number metric (not the only interesting measure) where one component is mostly to do with outside 'push', while the others are 'pull', and depend on how Wikipedians self-assign to tasks. Charles

As long as history doesn't come to an end, and new people keep getting born and (annoyingly) becoming notable enough for a Wikipedia article, there will always be a need for new articles.

Carcharoth