I've said this before and I will say it one more time: Do we want to keep the piss-poor definition for automatic article detection?
I propose (again) that the current definition be used for "entries" and a more stringent definition be used for "probable articles" (everything, of course, is still a page).
We can simply take the count for entries and exclude anything that is less than 500 bytes and has a link on it to [[Wikipedia:Disambiguation]] (or is listed on one of links of disambiguating pages pages). That would give us about 80,000 probable articles in the English Wikipedia (yes that still includes about 30,000 rambot articles but so what? They are far more useful as /articles/ than are many other entries we call articles).
The current prediction is that we should hit the 100,000 mark the middle of next week. Press release or no press release, that number on the Main Page will get some attention (thus the need for a press release to explain things).
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
On Sat, 18 Jan 2003, Daniel Mayer wrote:
I propose (again) that the current definition be used for "entries" and a more stringent definition be used for "probable articles" (everything, of course, is still a page).
If the definition is changed after we pass the 100,000 article milestone, then we would quite likely end up in the embarrassing situation of dropping back below it again, and people who have seen the press reports might think we were lying! And then would we do another press release when we passed the same milestone the second time...? ;)
Of course, we could change the word "articles" to "entries" on the Main page and in the press release now, and then do a second press release when we get to 100,000 *articles*. The advantage in this would be that we would get another chance for publicity, but the disadvantage would be that we would look rather silly...
Alternatively, someone could quickly rewrite the article-counter to follow mav's proposed new definition *before* the milestone is passed, and then we'd only have one milestone to deal with, later in the year. But then we'd have got all excited this week for no reason...
Or we could just leave redefining what an article is until we have enough proper articles that changing the definition would still leave us above the 100,000 mark, which would probably be the easiest thing to do.
Oliver
+-------------------------------------------+ | Oliver Pereira | | Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science | | University of Southampton | | omp199@ecs.soton.ac.uk | +-------------------------------------------+
Why not wait until we have 120,000 articles and then announce that we have 100,000?
I like the "we are working on 89,375 articles". I do not share the disdain for stubs, any more than I disdain a bud on a rose bush, but if we subtract the redirects, discount the Rambot articles and the stubs by 10 or 15 per cent, then, if we wait a bit, we can honestly claim to have 100,000 real articles and 20,000 under construction, and every one of the 120,000 open to further expansion.
Diddling around with the definition of "article" is not in the Wiki spirit, but undercounting and modestly claiming less than we could legitimately claim seems quite acceptable to me.
Tom Parmenter Ortolan88
|From: Oliver Pereira omp199@ecs.soton.ac.uk |X-ECS-MailScanner: Found to be clean |Sender: wikipedia-l-admin@wikipedia.org |Reply-To: wikipedia-l@wikipedia.org |Date: Sun, 19 Jan 2003 00:42:49 +0000 (GMT) | |On Sat, 18 Jan 2003, Daniel Mayer wrote: | |> I propose (again) that the current definition be used for "entries" and |> a more stringent definition be used for "probable articles" (everything, |> of course, is still a page). | |If the definition is changed after we pass the 100,000 article milestone, |then we would quite likely end up in the embarrassing situation of |dropping back below it again, and people who have seen the press reports |might think we were lying! And then would we do another press release when |we passed the same milestone the second time...? ;) | |Of course, we could change the word "articles" to "entries" on the Main |page and in the press release now, and then do a second press release when |we get to 100,000 *articles*. The advantage in this would be that we would |get another chance for publicity, but the disadvantage would be that we |would look rather silly... | |Alternatively, someone could quickly rewrite the article-counter to follow |mav's proposed new definition *before* the milestone is passed, and then |we'd only have one milestone to deal with, later in the year. But then |we'd have got all excited this week for no reason... | |Or we could just leave redefining what an article is until we have enough |proper articles that changing the definition would still leave us above |the 100,000 mark, which would probably be the easiest thing to do. | |Oliver | |+-------------------------------------------+ || Oliver Pereira | || Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science | || University of Southampton | || omp199@ecs.soton.ac.uk | |+-------------------------------------------+ | |_______________________________________________ |Wikipedia-l mailing list |Wikipedia-l@wikipedia.org |http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l |
Tom Parmenter wrote:
Why not wait until we have 120,000 articles and then announce that we have 100,000?
it's twisted... I like it
I like the "we are working on 89,375 articles". I do not share the disdain for stubs, any more than I disdain a bud on a rose bush,
Indeed. stubbishness is in the eye of the beholder. A biography might still be called a stub at a couple of pages.
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.
--Jimbo
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.
So, we'll ignore the "comma count" hitting the 100.000 in, oh, 115 articles?
Magnus
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
On lun, 2003-01-20 at 09:58, Kurt Jansson wrote:
BTW, we could need some figures (for the German Wp and Wp-wide): daily active users, pageviews, etc. Brion?
Yeah, yeah, I know. I've got to run the stats program again... need to put that in the crontab...
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Well, there we have it!
Judging from the counter on the Main Page, the 100,000 article milestone has just been passed.
The historic 100,000th article turns out to be the perhaps slightly unglamorously titled "Hastings, New Zealand", posted by... *drum roll* Lisiate! Well done, Lisiate.
Incidentally, I now have the have the unenviable honour of being responsible for both the 99,999th article and the 100,001st.
Damn.
I'm going home to sulk now...
Oliver
+-------------------------------------------+ | Oliver Pereira | | Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science | | University of Southampton | | omp199@ecs.soton.ac.uk | +-------------------------------------------+
On lun, 2003-01-20 at 19:46, Oliver Pereira wrote:
Incidentally, I now have the have the unenviable honour of being responsible for both the 99,999th article and the 100,001st.
Damn.
I'm going home to sulk now...
Don't worry, there are still some old garbage pages lying around that need to be deleted. If we delete one with a comma in it, the count goes down by one and your 100,001st moves back into place. ;)
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
On lun, 2003-01-20 at 09:58, Kurt Jansson wrote:
BTW, we could need some figures (for the German Wp and Wp-wide): daily active users, pageviews, etc. Brion?
Okay, still getting these back up...
http://de.wikipedia.org/stats http://nl.wikipedia.org/stats
Note that the first 5 days of January are missing as I rotated the logs at that point and haven't yet figured out how to get Webalizer to use info from two files in the same month. (If you see them by the time you look at it, then I've got it fixed by then. :P )
Sorry for the wait, Giskart... Individual visitors (insofar as log analyzers can figure out) should appear under 'total unique sites'. This will overcount some dynamic IPs on sparse networks and undercount users behind proxies and dynamic IPs that are used by multiple folks.
More will follow, expect the same URL style as above.
-- brion
"Daniel Mayer" maveric149@yahoo.com, Saturday, January 18, 2003 6:31 PM:
The current prediction is that we should hit the 100,000 mark the middle of next week. Press release or no press release, that number on the Main Page will get some attention (thus the need for a press release to explain things).
It appears that [[Louis Theroux]] by Oliver Pereira at 03:36 UTC Jan 21, 2003 is the English Wikipedia's 100,000th article (using our current article counting system).
-- Mark ("Mrwojo")
Daniel Mayer wrote:
I've said this before and I will say it one more time: Do we want to keep the piss-poor definition for automatic article detection?
The idea of an "encyclopedia" consisting of "articles" is based in three centuries of printed works. What we're building here is something new, a dynamic "web" of "nodes". Perhaps the number of edits per day is a more interesting measure than the number of articles. If we have 200,000 articles and nobody updates them, what will the value of Wikipedia be? Should the special:statistics page show the number of edits and page views per day and per month?
The power of an automobile is still measured in horsepowers, but other metrics are all new, such as the milage (miles per gallon of fuel).
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