[Foundation-l] Wikipedia songs

Thu Jan 31 15:26:23 UTC 2008

Actually, I really like Kat's idea. We could come up with quite a few  
"metrics", such as weasel-joules and Pages per Flush,  and come up  
with an interesting, yet informative and non-annoying hold message.

I think it would both entertain and not irritate our callers to hear  
exactly how big Wikimedia projects are, as expressed in various  
metrics. Examples:
* If you were to view every article on every language Wikipedia, it  
would take you  X amount of time.
*If you printed out the German Wikipedia, and stretched it out end to  
end, it would cover X% of the distance to Mars -- that's Y million  
American Football fields, or Z billion soccer pitches.
* A single California Redwood tree can create enough paper to print  
out the Esperanto Wikinews twice.
*More people visited the English Wikipedia today then the entire  
population of (insert several small countries here).

Not only is it interesting and informative, but the research process  
to come up with even baseline answers for these kinds of questions  
would be really fun IMHO. While Kat may not want to rough-estimate the  
energy output of a crazed weasel, I kind of want to. ;)

-Dan rosenthal
On Jan 30, 2008, at 9:42 PM, Kat Walsh wrote:

> Seriously, though, I would like to see the RfA candidate song replaced
> by something else... not because I don't enjoy that too, but because
> it seems too inside-jokey for the "hold music".
>
> (Maybe a selection of weird facts, combined with announcements? "If
> you printed out all the articles on Wikimedia projects, they would
> fill six dozen toilet tanks. But it will all fit on a DVD..." or "it
> would take 50 trucks full of crazed weasels running on wheels to
> provide the energy to keep Wikipedia's servers up for one day... or
> 100 donations from readers like you.")
>
> -Kat
> not checking the math on this, and especially not going to
> experimentally verify the energy output of a crazed weasel