[Wikipedia-l] Sometimes, there is every reason to be amazed

Sun Oct 5 18:12:28 UTC 2003

Richard Grevers
>> How many do we need ?
>>
>At least 11,000 across all languages other than en. 
>(en had 161,000 yesterday)

Actually it is /much/ closer than that when you also include the UseMod wikis:

En.Wikipedia: 161,813
All others:       158,895
TOTAL:           320,708

Numbers based on October 1st count here: 
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Multilingual_statistics 
(please check my math somebody!)

But even if the non-English count passed the English one in the last few days, 
it would be very schizophrenic and confusing to say in the press release; 
1) we have reached 300,000 articles (MediaWiki count)
2) there are now more articles in other languages than in English (MediaWiki + 
UseMod count)
3) there are 162,000 articles in English 

That just does not add up! 

Better, IMO, to wait for the MediaWiki + UseMod 1/3 of a million milestone. 
That count includes all Wikipedias and it would then not be confusing to say 
that there are more articles in other languages than in English. 

The 300,000 figure is getting a bit stale anyway with all the 
hardware/performance delays. IMO, the issue will be moot by Wednesday the 7th 
anyway, since that marks a week since we hit the 300,000 "milestone" - stale 
(and not really correct) news by that point. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)