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

Sun Jan 19 00:56:56 UTC 2003

Why not wait until we have 120,000 articles and then announce that we
have 100,000?

I like the "we are working on 89,375 articles".  I do not share the
disdain for stubs, any more than I disdain a bud on a rose bush, but
if we subtract the redirects, discount the Rambot articles and the
stubs by 10 or 15 per cent, then, if we wait a bit, we can honestly
claim to have 100,000 real articles and 20,000 under construction, and
every one of the 120,000  open to further expansion.  

Diddling around with the definition of "article" is not in the Wiki
spirit, but undercounting and modestly claiming less than we could
legitimately claim seems quite acceptable to me.  

Tom Parmenter
Ortolan88

|From: Oliver Pereira <omp199 at ecs.soton.ac.uk>
|X-ECS-MailScanner: Found to be clean
|Sender: wikipedia-l-admin at wikipedia.org
|Reply-To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
|Date: Sun, 19 Jan 2003 00:42:49 +0000 (GMT)
|
|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                    |
|+-------------------------------------------+
|
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