Mav wrote:
Toby wrote:
Why don't we just say "thousands and thousands of articles"?
Bad idea. It is important to have a running count of our progress in the most visible place - the Main Page.
It *would* be important to have it there, if we *had* such a running count. But we need to change our definition of "article" every time we see something new that shouldn't count. And the definition was *never* correctly implemented by the software.
I made this proposal because I've come to believe that we can't ever have a reasonable running count. Rather than let the number climb slowly up over time and be slashed down when we change the definition, we should stop pretending that we actually know how many articles we have.
Of course, if you think that we *do* know how many, then you would disagree with me. But knowing how many satisfies some software hack isn't the same thing.
We already have a definition for what we consider an article to be and what we let the software count as an article. All we need to do is change the definitions so that bot-generated entries are not counted as articles until x number of human non-minor edits have been made to them.
See http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_is_an_article
I know all about this page, I helped write it. While I think that it still serves the purpose of telling people how our own thinking goes, it doesn't serve the purpose of giving a quantifiable definition.
-- Toby