[Wikipedia-l] Is a press release now a good idea?

Fri Oct 3 15:41:43 UTC 2003

Jimbo wrote:
>It is my belief that the next round of upgrades, i.e. the 
>big Opteron server for $6,000 that we will buy once 
>contributions reach a high enough level, will give us 
>around 10x our October 1st capacity. That's substantial, 
>and we'll take a while to outgrow that.  And in the 
>meantime, we'll be constantly raising money to stay 
>ahead of the curve.

Sweet! But what should be our headline announcement? 
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia's_first_press_release is announcing 
our 300,000th article, but that is based on the article count of only our 
MediaWiki Wikipedia versions. It does not count the 20,000+ articles still 
under UseMod (we missed the real 300,000 milestone because we simply were not 
ready yet). It may just be me, but I think at this point we should just wait 
a couple to a few weeks for the more inclusive and exciting-sounding  "one 
third of a million" milestone. The number of non-English articles should also 
outnumber the English ones by then, so we could also announce that.   

What do others think? This could be something we allow each Wikipedia version 
to decide on its own (en.wikipedia already had a X00,000 press release this 
year, so something a bit different would be nice, at least for en.wikipedia). 
But that may be confusing for multilingual press and readers given the 
different article counts. 

But before we decide on anything, could somebody check my math here 
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Multilingual_statistics#2003_Statistics 
? I may have overcounted the UseMod wikis....

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)