--- Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com wrote:
One of the /major/ points of having an article count is to measure
the
relative progress of our community effort. Therefore it is not
surprising
that many people feel that their relative contribution to the project
is
somehow lessoned in value when a bot comes around and does in three
weeks
what took 2,000 + humans over a year to do.
There is also concern that a critical media reporter might use the
fact that
"almost half" of our articles are machine-generated against us. If
anything
we should be as conservative as possible in our article counts to
avoid
giving our critics easy ways to dismiss our progress.
These are good arguments for omitting Ram's articles from the count; there are equally good arguments for including them: after all most everyone seems to agree that they are perfectly good articles, and we wouldn't want to discriminate against machines, no would we?
Any single article number on the main page is bound to be a misleading simplification. I agree with Toby's suggestion: "We have many thousands of articles" and make that a link to the statistics page, where we present, with all the appropriate explanations and caveats, the counts of human edited articles, all articles, articles longer than 500 characters, 1000 characters, the growth rates, etc. etc.
Besides, I find boasting about the article number rather childish. 100,000 times crap is still crap, just more of it.
Axel
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