[Foundation-l] A dangerous precedent

[Milos Rancic]

On 12/29/07, Matthew Britton <matthew.britton at btinternet.com> wrote:
> Milos Rancic wrote:
> > - "if not millions" is also a poetic nonsense. Please, read some
> > statistics [2] before expressing such bold "facts".
>
> The English Wikipedia has more than six million registered user
> accounts. About 50 editions of Wikipedia have more than 1000 registered
> user accounts. Content has thus been added by thousands of users in
> about 50 cases, and millions in at least one case. In what way does this
> constitute "poetic nonsense"?

You said "if not millions of contributors". To be a contributor you
have to make at least one contribution. English Wikipedia had 151934
such contributors at the end of October 2006. To have 2 millions
(which is the smallest number of the meaning of plural form of the
number millions) number of en.wp contributors had to be increased for
around 1300%, while the biggest relative increase of new contributors
between past Octobers was 400% (October 2001 - October 2002 and
smaller in the next years).

I would really like to see millions of contributors on all projects or
at least on English Wikipedia. But, we don't have them and the last
thing which we need in serious discussions are poetic hyperbolas and
mystifications.