On Mon, 2003-03-10 at 06:02, Daniel Mayer wrote:
Now, we are well aware that page-count fever has gripped Wikipedia for some time. The obsession with breaking the 100,000-page barrier on the English stifled any implementation of reforms for fear of reducing the count. Concerns about languages which don't use the ASCII comma character have been shrugged off. Well, today I've seen enough.
What? Why are you blaming the English Wikipedia for this?
I'm rather curious how you came up with that interpretation of partisan wrangling.
If anything *AT ALL* people on en.wiki wanted a much more conservative count in order to put-off hitting 100,000 articles. There was general agreement on that point.
Aha, again demonstrating the obsession over the count. Why was it important to hit or not hit 100,000? Because of an offhand remark made a couple years ago about "we hope to reach 100,000 articles"?
When did this become our holy mission?
Did the messianic age begin when the counter flipped into six digits? Have we all been betrayed by a sinister being who wants to make us look bad by leading us astray and "inflating our count"?
What the *heck* does it matter?
Bad to whom? Embarrassing to whom? Is it solely the use of the word "article" that throws us off? Are we obsessed with proving that our "articles" are so fricking wonderful that every single one of them must be the greatest pinnacle of writing prowess or we must lock it in the basement of shame and never admit its existence?
Go open up a paper encyclopedia sometime. Look at it. A fair chunk of the articles are *one paragraph long*. Do their editors worry themselves over the metric they use to stamp "over 60,000 articles!" on the cover? Or do they just count the number of entries at some point and say "at least this many"?
We could have a separate count that has the more conservative definition
Why? What good is yet another arbitrary number? Why do we want it? What is it for?
So you want to inflate the count then by removing the comma requirement? I don't think that's such a good idea for en.wiki since it further weakens our already weak article definition.
Mav, thanks for proving my point again about count-mania. Are you seriously suggesting that the pseudo-random number spit out on the front page actually *defines* what articles are in a meaningful way?
Incidentally, if I were to change the count right now on the English Wikipedia, we'd get:
the comma count : 109062 for length > 0 : 116199 <- for length > 500: 90991
The "inflation" would be a meagre 6.5 percent.
The whole point of the comma count is to exclude small articles
Why? What's *wrong* with small articles?
Some "articles" *are* small.
Some non-"articles" are very long.
Some genuine "articles" of short to medium length don't contain a comma.
Many "junk pages", lists, and disambs do contain a comma.
Length and commas are just non-starters here. They provide no useful information.
Other languages don't use ASCII commas much if at all so the count is worthless for them.
You speak as though it has worth for English. It does not.
Unless a better count system is proposed, I will replace the comma check with a greater-than-zero-size check within twelve hours.
And what about the people who get the digest after your 12 hour deadline? How about the other people who only check or respond to Wikipedia posts during the week? Shouldn't they have a say in this?
They had their say months ago when no one was able to decide what to do. Do you really think a new consensus is going to come in 24 hours? 48? A week? A month? A year? I think you're sorely mistaken if so. But, please, feel free to prove me wrong.
Tell you what. I'll hold off until Wednesday night. Come up with a consensus on a better system by then, or comma-count shall be replaced with not-blank-count circa 07:00 UTC, 13 March. (11pm on the 12th here in PST.)
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)