[Wikipedia-l] Death to the comma count!

Sun Mar 9 20:54:04 UTC 2003

On 8 Mar 2003 at 14:15, Brion Vibber wrote:

> Unless a better count system is proposed, I will replace the comma check
> with a greater-than-zero-size check within twelve hours.

If I may propose sth in these heated discussion...
Just thoughts for the purpose of the
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Multilingual_statistics
and not for the new type of main page counter
(comma counting, or any other, will be sooner or later hacked
and again we will need to improve our security system :-)

Count the total length of all the the pages (uncompressed wiki!)
then divide it by
1) the number of articles
or
2) 1800 (DTP's standard length of A4 page in latin chars)

(excluding Wikipedia:, Talk: namespaces, etc of course)
Present both numbers, total length one of the ratios
I think that:
- the total length can be quite easily compared to paper
encyclopedia's size - one can very easily estimate
the length of one paper page
- the ratio roughly gives the amount of work spent
on creating articles (but not quality, perhaps one should
divide by total number of edits?)

If we need to compare latin-based wikis with nonlatin-based
wikis perhaps multiplying the ratio by the average latin
word length would be sufficient.

Hmm... nevertheless the idea is accepted by the whole
community or not I will try to count like that
Polish Wikipedia progress on my own.

Regards
Youandme