Hi Jimbo, hi list!
I support Mav's suggestion of a more stringent definition, imposed before we hit 100,000. We're in no hurry to make "fake milestones" of any kind. Better to have 100,000 next year, even, and have that *mean something*, than to have 100,000 now but have them be meaningless.
Hmm, isn't it a bit late for this?
I jounalist from Heise (who brought many new contributors to the German - and I guess also to the English - Wikipedia with his nice wiki article last week) told me he _might_ be able to write a newsticker entry on heise.de. This would be really cool, but of course he needs an occasion. I told him the English Wikipedia might start it's 100,000th article on the 19th, but you people have been a bit slow the last days ;-)
And please don't forget the psychological side. Many people will feel disappointed if the counter is set to xx,xxx just a few articles before we hit the 100,000 mark.
For me the counter is just a good sign to show people that the project is alive and that it's worth to invest their time in it. Something like "last month we started x,xxx new articles" on the main page might be even more impressing. "Scientific" measurements of our articles should be done on separate pages, with explanations why and how ... (I know we have already some nice pages there). The "100,000 articles" can't give a false impression to people, because you can't compare it to anything else. It would be another case if we said "We have already xx,xxx articles about topics that are also mentioned in the Encyclopedia Britannica/Brockhaus/...".
I nearly forgot: If you change the "algorithm" measuring the articles, does that also affect the non-english Wikipedias? We're writing a press release at the moment, because we'll have 10,000 articles at the end of january: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pressemitteilung Please don't make our counter drop down to 7,000 articles or so. We really need some press coverage.
BTW, we could need some figures (for the German Wp and Wp-wide): daily active users, pageviews, etc. Brion?
Kurt