[Wikipedia-l] 300,000 is a much better milestone (was: Preparing for 150,000 articles)

Mon Aug 4 08:37:28 UTC 2003

On Sun, 3 Aug 2003, Daniel Mayer wrote:

> Erik wrote:
> >Yes, I know what you're thinking -- not another
> >"x articles" press release.
>
> I thought we had well over 200,000 articles... I just checked en.wiki's
> Multilingual statistics page; the number is 270,616 as of July 31. So why not
> wait until we have 300,000 articles? That seems like a better milestone and
> it includes the /whole/ Wikipedia project, not just the English version. We
> already had a press release just for the English version earlier this year
> anyway.

I disagree. I think it is strange to count the various languages together
into one number. Some of these articles are translations of each other, others
are different articles about the same subject. It would be like Larousse
adding the number in the Petit Larousse and the Grand Larousse, or the
publisher of English-XXX dictionaries adding up all languages. Having many
languages available is certainly a good thing, but just adding up the numbers
gives a wholly false image.

Andre Engels