Round and round we go ..
We're not saying "we have 100.000 complete,
detailed, perfect,
bullet-proof articles", we say "we have 100.000 articles". We even link
directly to our definition of "article".
The major problem was the import of ~30,000 articles, but there is a valid
point to be made that these should be counted: Many of them *are* built
upon, either by people using "Random page" to find articles to work on, or
by people searching for their hometown etc. Then again, there are 10-
person-towns which are likely never to be edited.
I suggested counting only articles with a minimum number of edits, but
that wouldn't help us much here, as Rambot updates his own articles
occasionally to change the wording. Neither would a specific article
length. What would help us would be flagging particular users as bots and
excluding them from the count. [No offense to Ram-Man: A lot of work went
into the bot's design, but it is not equivalent to 30k human-written
articles.]
But there's the problem that we're going to cross 100k articles in a few
days, and nobody is going to rewrite the code until then. And after that,
drastically reducing our article count would seem silly. It's not that the
counter is *deceptive*, it just doesn't properly reflect the human
attention that articles have been given.
So here's what we should do: Go ahead, put out the press release when we
reach 100K. Work on a system to properly handle bots in the article count.
Then, suggest this revised article count as a way to measure our *human*
contributions and list it as an additional count in the stats. If we feel
like it, we can put out another 100K press release when we hit that count,
and hope that nobody remembers our first one ;-)
Vera Cruz
Well, I never had any quarrel with him/her/it. I noticed some strange
activity on Recent Chages, but that was it.
On the other hand, I *am* tempted to ban "Vera Cruz" just to reduce the
amount of incoming mails.
If it's Lir (prove!), or harming the 'pedia (subtle or not), I say get
rid of it.
Proof:
1) Vera Cruz appeared immediately after Lir's ban. Her edit behavior is
virtually identical (mark everything as minor, don't use preview etc.).
Her homepage style, listing all minor edits, is the same. She has worked
on exactly the same articles and finished the work she started as Lir.
2) Brion checked the email address and it was Adam [name omitted for privacy reasons] (she
has
reportedly since changed it to another Hotmail account). A. [name omitted for privacy
reasons] runs
this blog:
http://qwert.diaryland.com/ where she has written about her
Wikipedia experiences as Lir. Lir has also posted to this list as "Bridget
[name omitted for privacy reasons]", a name for which Google has no hits other than
these archived
mails.
Images
After DW told me some weeks ago in a rather commanding tone that some
images I uploaded were too large and to dark (images that I had already
downsized, filtered and dust-removed), and started to replace them with
tiny thumbs, I found myself rather displeased with the current image
handling, both by software and by people. Did anyone notice that lots of
our images have no source or PD explanation given? That we have
double/triple images of the same thing/person? That there are "x.jpg",
"x (small).jpg", "x (large).jpg", etc. and no handling of the
different
sizes?
See wikitech-l discussion - let's go ahead and redesign the image code to
generate thumbnails on request.
Consensus
Great thing. We talk about the different options, argue a little, and
finally agree on the way to go.
Except we don't.
Anyone know a country or big company that is successfully run by
consensus? I don't.
Dictatorship or voting. Pick one.
You know I agree. The main problem I see is that we already *are* voting
(votes for deletion, votes for NPOV, votes for
www.wikipedia.org) without
an ordered process to do so because, thanks to the anarchists who
constantly decry voting, we are living in cognitive dissonance. This
ordered process should actually be supported by the anarchists, because we
could say "before any vote, we have an argument period of X days and try
to collect all pro/con arguments on a wiki page; everyone who votes is
encouraged to make a reasonable effort to read and understand these
arguments". We can also set specific thresholds instead of the current
guessing what the "not quite unanimous consensus" is.
Things will only change when Jimbo decides to let us officially use voting
in some cases. He said to me that he thinks that voting may be necessary
in a small number of cases, so perhaps it's possible to convince him. Drop
him a mail.
Regards,
Erik