[Foundation-l] Lack of research on Wikipedia

[Thomas Dalton]

2009/8/20 Erik Zachte <erikzachte at infodisiac.com>:
> Too often I see people bragging how they managed to 'one up' another
> Wikipedia in the rankings.
> I think it would help if we discouraged any bragging on the 4th millionth
> article in the English Wikipedia at all and downplayed any inquiries from
> the media.

Milestones are important, especially for PR purposes. We just need to
work out which milestones should be emphasised. For small Wikipedias
number of articles is probably a good choice, for larger ones,
particularly the English Wikipedia, it probably isn't. We need to
start emphasising quality more than quantity (everyone knows we have
lots and lots of articles - that's not news!). A few months ago we
passed the 2,500 FA milestone on enwiki and I completely missed it -
that would have been a good milestone to make a big deal about. We
should make a big deal out of the 3000 FA milestone when we get there
(probably about a year's time, judging by a quick glance at the FA
stats page). FAs+GAs is approaching 10,000, though - we'll probably
reach that in a couple of months - I suggest issuing a press release
for that milestone in an attempt to get the media interested in the
quality of Wikipedia articles. (Obviously self-assessed quality is
only of limited value, but external assessment doesn't happen very
often.)