Thanks Brion for your proposal. I always appreciate that you take non-English pedias like Japanese one seriously. But I have a slightly different take on this issue.
1. threshold
Regarding the suggested article count, how about making it 50bytes and greater instead of 0? I know that either threshold is arbitrary, but I guess 50 is likely to be better than 0.
2. English-centrism
It happened to be that Japanese wikipedia became quite active after English wikipedia reached 10,000 - the achievement was reported in WiredNews, and it was translated into WiredNews Japan. That brought a wave of new visitors, some of them still active today.
So, even though the act of resisting any change in article count method might be that of English-centrism of a kind, somehow Japanese wikipedia benefited from it. It's good to realize that the English and non-English sites do not always have zero-sum relation. (And it's good if others can come up with some win-win type solution for other matters.)
3. Immediate implementation
In my personal opinion, (which could be very different from average or most popular opinions of others in Japanese wikipedia), Japanese wikipedia does not have an urgent need to change the article count.
Of course, the change itself is good. The current system is quite useless for Japanese pages, (because Japanse writing doesn't include that alphabetical comma much) and I rely on page counts to understand the growth. It is somewhat inconvenient when it comes to comparing Japanese one with others. The international statistics on English wiki reports article counts only. I have to go to other sites one-by-one, and see the page counts.
And I believe that Brion waited long enough for his part.
But it just happned to be that, in my personal opinion, Japanese wikipedians are now in the process of forming basic policies and guidelines (naming conventions, styles, etc. in Japanese language), as well as some community-like ties among users. Article is growing, but registered users are not very much, and most posting are from registered users and a few specific IP-only users. That shouldn't continue very long, but for now, it is not a bad thing to prepare infrastructure for the next slashdotting. And anyway, the article count for the japanese 'pedia will not reach some landmark figures like 5,000 or 10,000 for several weeks or so.
So, while I am thankful to Brion's declaration, I personally think that Japanese wikipedians might be able to wait a bit if others want to stop him for some good reasons.
(I'm not sure if anyone can stop Brion, though ;)
best,
Tomos
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Tomos at Wikipedia wrote:
- English-centrism
I would say that if at all possible, within the parameters of trying to come up with a better and more reasonable counting system, that any changes should benefit (if possible!) the non-English wikipedias more than the English wikipedia.
In this particular case, Brion's motivation is that the French has seen people adding commas for no good reason, right? I absolutely do NOT want the French to get the feeling that we're changing the rules in order to penalize them.
--Jimbo
Hello,
In this particular case, Brion's motivation is that the French has seen people adding commas for no good reason, right? I absolutely do NOT want the French to get the feeling that we're changing the rules in order to penalize them.
That is a job for an ambassador ;-) Unfortuantely, I am very busy now. Can anyone give me a summary ? I am willing to translate any message linked to the French Wikipedia and send it on the mailing list and our village pump.
Does someone have any question about French Wikipedia ?
Regards
Youssef aka youssefsan
--- Oualmakran Youssef youssefsan@altern.org wrote:
Hello,
In this particular case, Brion's motivation is
that the French has
seen people adding commas for no good reason,
right? I absolutely do
NOT want the French to get the feeling that we're
changing the rules
in order to penalize them.
That is a job for an ambassador ;-) Unfortuantely, I am very busy now. Can anyone give me a summary ? I am willing to translate any message linked to the French Wikipedia and send it on the mailing list and our village pump.
Does someone have any question about French Wikipedia ?
Regards
Youssef aka youssefsan
Rebonsoir Youssef
bah, j ai un peu de temps moi meme ces jours ci. Il n y a pas de probleme. L'inqui�tude de Jimbo n'est pas fond�e. Et l'auteur des derni�res insertions de virgules entre commentaires a eu la g�n�rosit� de les retirer pour me faire plaisir ! Cool ! je mettrais un lien vers le vote dans m�ta au bistro...si quelqu'un ne le fait pas avant :-)
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On Mon, 10 Mar 2003, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Tomos at Wikipedia wrote:
- English-centrism
I would say that if at all possible, within the parameters of trying to come up with a better and more reasonable counting system, that any changes should benefit (if possible!) the non-English wikipedias more than the English wikipedia.
I disagree. We should try to get the greatest benefit for ALL Wikipedias. What we should try to avoid is changes that benefit the English one but are disadvantageous to (some of) the others, but if we have to options, one of which benefits the English a lot and the others somewhat, and the other the English a little bit and the others somewhat, then the first one is preferable.
In this particular case, Brion's motivation is that the French has seen people adding commas for no good reason, right? I absolutely do NOT want the French to get the feeling that we're changing the rules in order to penalize them.
If I remember correctly, the French that are present at this list were just as negative about this action as the others were.
If you want another reason, the current comma-count underestimates the Japanese Wikipedia quite a bit because Japanese uses less commas than most western languages.
Regarding other issues mentioned here: 1. If we measure from some minimum size, I would like to put my vote at 100 bytes. 2. Voting seems like a good idea. My proposal would be to use two questions, the first what kind of counting system to use (keep the comma count, count all non-redirect main namespace articles, set a minimum size, anything else that gets proposed, do not count at all), the second what minimum size to use (taking the median answer, and counting people who do not fill in something here but say 'all articles' to question 1 as voting for 0). 3. Some languages have taken over the 'Wikipedia is not a dictionary' attitude from the English, others tend to welcome very stubby articles with only a dictionary definition. Both ways of working are valid, but I do think that the 'dictionary' encyclopedias tend to appear 'too large' if we use article count - especially if we do it to all articles, or with a cutoff at only 6 or 10 or even 100 bytes. I would therefore like to propose to extend the existing statistics by _also_ making a list of the sizes by total article _size_ rather than total article _number_.
Andre Engels
--- Andre Engels engels@uni-koblenz.de wrote:
On Mon, 10 Mar 2003, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Tomos at Wikipedia wrote:
- English-centrism
I would say that if at all possible, within the
parameters of trying
to come up with a better and more reasonable
counting system, that any
changes should benefit (if possible!) the
non-English wikipedias more
than the English wikipedia.
I disagree. We should try to get the greatest benefit for ALL Wikipedias. What we should try to avoid is changes that benefit the English one but are disadvantageous to (some of) the others, but if we have to options, one of which benefits the English a lot and the others somewhat, and the other the English a little bit and the others somewhat, then the first one is preferable.
I disagree. The option 1 is more often chosen because of the weight of people, so that is a fact, but I see not why it would be the *best* option. It might be the best choice for english, not for others. I am not even sure it is the best choice at all.
In this particular case, Brion's motivation is
that the French has
seen people adding commas for no good reason,
right? I absolutely do
NOT want the French to get the feeling that we're
changing the rules
in order to penalize them.
If I remember correctly, the French that are present at this list were just as negative about this action as the others were.
Absolutely Comma hunting is a lot of distraction, but most seem very willing to go to another system. Some favor the >0 count. Other go to 100 to 200 bytes
So I don't think the french would be a pb to quit the current system.
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On Mon, 10 Mar 2003, Anthere wrote:
--- Andre Engels engels@uni-koblenz.de wrote:
On Mon, 10 Mar 2003, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Tomos at Wikipedia wrote:
- English-centrism
I would say that if at all possible, within the
parameters of trying
to come up with a better and more reasonable
counting system, that any
changes should benefit (if possible!) the
non-English wikipedias more
than the English wikipedia.
I disagree. We should try to get the greatest benefit for ALL Wikipedias. What we should try to avoid is changes that benefit the English one but are disadvantageous to (some of) the others, but if we have to options, one of which benefits the English a lot and the others somewhat, and the other the English a little bit and the others somewhat, then the first one is preferable.
I disagree. The option 1 is more often chosen because of the weight of people, so that is a fact, but I see not why it would be the *best* option. It might be the best choice for english, not for others. I am not even sure it is the best choice at all.
If it's better for English, and as good for the others, it's better in my opinion. I consider that self-evident. Or would you prefer that we intentionally cripple the English Wikipedia to get more people at the other languages?
Andre Engels
wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org