[Wikipedia-l] Death to the comma count!

[Tomos at Wikipedia]

Thanks Brion for your proposal. I always appreciate that you take 
non-English pedias like Japanese one seriously. But I have a slightly 
different take on this issue.

1. threshold

Regarding the suggested article count, how about making it 50bytes and 
greater instead of 0?
I know that either threshold is arbitrary, but I guess 50 is likely to be 
better than 0.

2. English-centrism

It happened to be that Japanese wikipedia became quite active after English 
wikipedia reached 10,000 - the achievement was reported in WiredNews, and it 
was translated into WiredNews Japan. That brought a wave of new visitors, 
some of them still active today.

So, even though the act of resisting any change in article count method 
might be that of English-centrism of a kind, somehow Japanese wikipedia 
benefited from it. It's good to realize that the English and non-English 
sites do not always have zero-sum relation. (And it's good if others can 
come up with some win-win type solution for other matters.)

3. Immediate implementation

In my personal opinion, (which could be very different from average or most 
popular opinions of others in Japanese wikipedia), Japanese wikipedia does 
not have an urgent need to change the article count.

Of course, the change itself is good.
The current system is quite useless for Japanese pages, (because Japanse 
writing doesn't include that alphabetical comma much) and I rely on page 
counts to understand the growth. It is somewhat inconvenient when it comes 
to comparing Japanese one with others. The international statistics on 
English wiki reports article counts only. I have to go to other sites 
one-by-one, and see the page counts.

And I believe that Brion waited long enough for his part.

But it just happned to be that, in my personal opinion, Japanese wikipedians 
are now in the process of forming basic policies and guidelines (naming 
conventions, styles, etc. in Japanese language), as well as some 
community-like ties among users. Article is growing, but registered users 
are not very much, and most posting are from registered users and a few 
specific IP-only users. That shouldn't continue very long, but for now, it 
is not a bad thing to prepare infrastructure for the next slashdotting.
And anyway, the article count for the japanese 'pedia will not reach some 
landmark figures like 5,000 or 10,000 for several weeks or so.

So, while I am thankful to Brion's declaration, I personally think that 
Japanese wikipedians might be able to wait a bit if others want to stop him 
for some good reasons.

(I'm not sure if anyone can stop Brion, though ;)

best,

Tomos

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