[Wikipedia-l] Tic, toc, tic, toc - Approaching 100,000 English "articles"

Sun Jan 19 00:42:49 UTC 2003

On Sat, 18 Jan 2003, Daniel Mayer wrote:

> I propose (again) that the current definition be used for "entries" and
> a more stringent definition be used for "probable articles" (everything,
> of course, is still a page).

If the definition is changed after we pass the 100,000 article milestone,
then we would quite likely end up in the embarrassing situation of
dropping back below it again, and people who have seen the press reports
might think we were lying! And then would we do another press release when
we passed the same milestone the second time...? ;)

Of course, we could change the word "articles" to "entries" on the Main
page and in the press release now, and then do a second press release when
we get to 100,000 *articles*. The advantage in this would be that we would
get another chance for publicity, but the disadvantage would be that we
would look rather silly...

Alternatively, someone could quickly rewrite the article-counter to follow
mav's proposed new definition *before* the milestone is passed, and then
we'd only have one milestone to deal with, later in the year. But then
we'd have got all excited this week for no reason...

Or we could just leave redefining what an article is until we have enough
proper articles that changing the definition would still leave us above
the 100,000 mark, which would probably be the easiest thing to do.

Oliver

+-------------------------------------------+
| Oliver Pereira                            |
| Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science |
| University of Southampton                 |
| omp199 at ecs.soton.ac.uk                    |
+-------------------------------------------+