[Foundation-l] Tragical dynamics: that run for the number of articles

Fri Jun 27 14:51:42 UTC 2008

On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 9:49 PM, Ziko van Dijk <zvandijk at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Maybe this is not the most popular item, but I do like to comment on
> the news about Japanese and Polish Wikipedias and their 500,000
> articles each. In fact, jp.WP actually has 500,000, but pl.WP does
> not.
> In an attempt to compare Wikipedia language editions I have clicked
> the button "random articles" and with a sample of 50 clicks each I
> have calculated how many articles a language edition really has, minus
> all those pseudo articles.

Yes, it's good to remind folks that "article count" is not a good
metric as it fails to take into account the cultural norms within the
language communities.

For a real startling view of what you are observing, you can see the
wikistats show Ja: (orange) has never had a "bot bump" like pl:, where
all those jagged jumps (yellow) are bot additions, meaning those
articles very likely have never been edited by humans.

http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/PlotsPngArticlesTotal.htm#p2

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)