I don't recall anyone mentioning the [[Wikipedia:Largest encyclopedia]] page on this list; it has been there less than a week.
I find it an antidote to some current debates. The graphs are great. Basically two years of trend growth with hardly a hiccup.
Surely the fact that revisions per article is rising just as much as the number of articles is hopeful for the article quality. (Medians rather than just means would be good to know, of course.)
Charles
Surely the fact that revisions per article is rising just as much as the number of articles is hopeful for the article quality. (Medians rather than just means would be good to know, of course.)
Hopefully it is that, rather than an indication of an increasing frequency of edit-warring.
Jay JG wrote
Surely the fact that revisions per article is rising just as much as the number of articles is hopeful for the article quality. (Medians rather than just means would be good to know, of course.)
Hopefully it is that, rather than an indication of an increasing frequency of edit-warring.
I really can't give any credence to the idea that edit wars could pull up the numbers much, averaged over the 400000 pages of the English Wikipedia. Not enough editwarriors to go round.
In fact I would argue the diametrically opposite position. The general line of talk that WP is in some way failing/is getting filled with rubbish/is losing credibility/has a serious IP vandal problem/is not applying adequate scholarly standards is based, as far as I can see, on very thin anecdotal evidence. Except for the last of those gripes, it all seems itself to be very much open to a counterattack along the lines that it is only marginally credible, and depends on a highly selective, even panicky, reading of the quantitative facts. Putting it another way, no decent Wikipedia article about WP could contain a sentence like 'in 2004 unregistered vandals were a serious threat to WP'; that would get shouted down as POV, and probably with a hidden agenda.
And I think clicking Random Page 100 times supports the impression that things improve. One example is that the category system has come on well, over the past three months.
Charles
"Charles Matthews" wrote
I really can't give any credence to the idea that edit wars could pull up the numbers much, averaged over the 400000 pages of the English Wikipedia. Not enough editwarriors to go round.
I'm not sure how that's measured; I've discovered edit wars in all sorts of articles, and as Wikipedia becomes more famous, the number of edit warriors seems to be growing. That said, the new enforcement of the 3RR should help.
In fact I would argue the diametrically opposite position. The general line of talk that WP is in some way failing/is getting filled with rubbish/is losing credibility/has a serious IP vandal problem/is not applying adequate scholarly standards is based, as far as I can see, on very thin anecdotal evidence... And I think clicking Random Page 100 times supports the impression that things improve. One example is that the category system has come on well, over the past three months.
Well, some might consider that "thin anectodal evidence". ;-)
Jay JG wrote
"Charles Matthews" wrote
And I think clicking Random Page 100 times supports the impression that things improve. One example is that the category system has come on
well,
over the past three months.
Well, some might consider that "thin anectodal evidence". ;-)
Not really. It's a repeatable experiment, and can produce confidence in its results as it is repeated. For example noting the number of uncategorised pages in 100 random ones gives an estimator of the proportion in the whole. Do it a few times, and the estimated proportion should settle down to the real figure. That does assume that Random Page is uniform over all main space pages (which might be wrong).
Charles