On Monday 11 November 2002 01:25 pm, wikipedia-l-request@wikipedia.org wrote:
Why don't we just say "thousands and thousands of articles"?
Since we've agreed that there's no certain way to automatically detect which articles are "real", making milestones like 100K even more meaningless than usual, we shouldn't pretend than any one figure is correct. Anybody that's interested in a total count, using any of the various automatic definitions of "article", can look at [[Wikipedia:Statistics]] for that information. Anybody that believes a particular method of counting to be useful can announce milestones based on it on [[Wikipedia:Announcements]].
We can even link from [[Main Page]] to [[Wikipedia:Statistics]] directly from the phrase "thousands and thousands of articles", so even newcomers can get an easily accessible precise count -- deciding for themselves which precise count is most accurate.
-- Toby
Bad idea. It is important to have a running count of our progress in the most visible place - the Main Page. We already have a definition for what we consider an article to be and what we let the software count as an article. All we need to do is change the definitions so that bot-generated entries are not counted as articles until x number of human non-minor edits have been made to them.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
See http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_is_an_article
Mav wrote:
Toby wrote:
Why don't we just say "thousands and thousands of articles"?
Bad idea. It is important to have a running count of our progress in the most visible place - the Main Page.
It *would* be important to have it there, if we *had* such a running count. But we need to change our definition of "article" every time we see something new that shouldn't count. And the definition was *never* correctly implemented by the software.
I made this proposal because I've come to believe that we can't ever have a reasonable running count. Rather than let the number climb slowly up over time and be slashed down when we change the definition, we should stop pretending that we actually know how many articles we have.
Of course, if you think that we *do* know how many, then you would disagree with me. But knowing how many satisfies some software hack isn't the same thing.
We already have a definition for what we consider an article to be and what we let the software count as an article. All we need to do is change the definitions so that bot-generated entries are not counted as articles until x number of human non-minor edits have been made to them.
See http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_is_an_article
I know all about this page, I helped write it. While I think that it still serves the purpose of telling people how our own thinking goes, it doesn't serve the purpose of giving a quantifiable definition.
-- Toby
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