[Foundation-l] Tragical dynamics: that run for the number of articles

[Tomasz Ganicz]

2008/6/29 Stephen Bain <stephen.bain at gmail.com>:
> On Sun, Jun 29, 2008 at 10:03 AM, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
>>
>> I'd like to propose a quality metric: The difference in rank
>> between the article count and the compressed database size.
>
> I think this is a good metric, especially because it's a relative
> metric (since it's effectively comparing projects against their peers
> to see how mature they are).
>
> Someone earlier was discussing article sizes, so I hacked up a script
> to graph the distribution of article sizes:
>
> http://www.toolserver.org/~thebainer/articlesizes/
>

Yes, but size of avarage article can be easily icreased artifically
by bot-creation of inofoboxes, navigation templates, long list of
categories and interwiki etc.

Take a look for example on:

http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telmisartan

infobox is around 90% of its content. Blame Polish Wikipedia that it
allows creating such articles, I would agree with you :-) The article
was created by human not by bot.

Higher average size of articles in any Wikipedia can be easilly
achieved just by creating bot-only articles with plenty of statstical
data, huge infobox and several navigation templates. See example, I
have already shown:

http://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A4%D1%96%D0%B3%D1%83%D0%BB%D1%81_%D1%96_%D0%90%D0%BB%D1%96%D0%BD%D1%8C%D1%8F

Would be nice to have a tool comparing the "real" size of articles, by
which I mean counting size of free text only - without all templates
and other non-text stuff.


-- 
Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz
http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek
http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/
http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html