Hi,

since the site stats are conveniently stored in the site_stats table, I suggest subtracting the number of articles created by the Ram-Man bot (US Census city information) from the total number of articles.

Why? The NOA is primarily interesting as a measure of our collaborative progress. This is important for ourselves and for others. Personally, I've had several discussions about Wikipedia where I was reluctant to cite the NOA because of the high number of machine-generated articles, others probably feel the same.

I therefore believe we should generally exclude autogenerated articles (we can change the wording on Main_Page to reflect this). As it would be a 5 minute task for anyone with access to the db, is there any reason not to do it?

Regards,

Erik