[Wikipedia-l] Re: 90,000 articles

Mon Nov 11 23:43:49 UTC 2002

On Monday 11 November 2002 01:25 pm, wikipedia-l-request at wikipedia.org wrote:
> Why don't we just say "thousands and thousands of articles"?
>
> Since we've agreed that there's no certain way
> to automatically detect which articles are "real",
> making milestones like 100K even more meaningless than usual,
> we shouldn't pretend than any one figure is correct.
> Anybody that's interested in a total count,
> using any of the various automatic definitions of "article",
> can look at [[Wikipedia:Statistics]] for that information.
> Anybody that believes a particular method of counting to be useful
> can announce milestones based on it on [[Wikipedia:Announcements]].
>
> We can even link from [[Main Page]] to [[Wikipedia:Statistics]]
> directly from the phrase "thousands and thousands of articles",
> so even newcomers can get an easily accessible precise count --
> deciding for themselves which precise count is most accurate.
>
>
> -- Toby

Bad idea. It is important to have a running count of our progress in the most 
visible place - the Main Page. We already have a definition for what we 
consider an article to be and what we let the software count as an article. 
All we need to do is change the definitions so that bot-generated entries are 
not counted as articles until x number of human non-minor edits have been 
made to them.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

See
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_is_an_article