[Wikipedia-l] Re: The 100,000 articles goal and minimum article size

On Friday 13 September 2002 07:59 pm, Axel wrote: Yup. Each time I create a new article of any decent size there are anywhere from several to a dozen empty links. Therefore all I see for Wikipedia is geometric increases in total article count that will never stop at any point (in the same way as solving a question of science leads to several new questions). Somebody has already stated that there are 30 to 40 thousand human genes and that each of them deserves it's own article. I agree. I would also add that each of the millions of described and cataloged species on Earth also deserve their own articles. Same for every city, major highway and important geologic feature. Not to mention the many hundreds of thousands of national rulers, kingdoms, generals, notable people, major works of art/science/industry ect. that have ever existed. I forsee Wikipedia becoming an encyclopedia of encyclopedias. In order to squash this tendency all we need is a much more conservative definition of just what constitutes an article (and some vigilance to make sure people are not inserting crap into pages just to meet this definition). The current definition is far too liberal is this regard -- all you need is one blasted comma and the page, no matter how short and useless, is counted as an article. I vote that in addition to the already established criteria on what constitutes an article for automatic detection we add at least this additional criteria; no page less than x bytes is counted as being an article. That way stubs won't screw up our stats. I have suggested that this number can be as low as 500 bytes, others have suggested the minimum size should be set at 1000 bytes. I now think that the figure should be somewhere in between. But we need to establish this and announce it /before/ we hit 50,000 "articles" under our current definition. Lord knows we will probably be Slashdotted again after reaching our "50%" point. Be prepared to see a dramatic reduction in the total article count though. If we go with the 500 byte cutoff it could be reset to 32,000 articles. If we go nuts and set the cutoff at 1000 bytes the total count would drop to 22,000 (if I'm reading Wikipedia:Statistics right). Example of an article of 500 bytes; http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amora Example of an article of 776 bytes; http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/KWord Example of an article of 1000 bytes; http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqueduct Previous talk on this issue is at; http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Statistics I vote for this too -- it is a rather arbitrary number and if anything should be just a milestone (so that we can say we have more articles than Britannica). However, that figure will have little meaning if; "In [[Greek mythology]], '''Cedalion''' was [[Hephaestus]]' servant." is considered to be an article just because there is a comma. At best, that is a sad stub definition. -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)