On Mon, 10 Mar 2003, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Tomos at Wikipedia wrote:
2. 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