Wikipedia:Village pump/November 2003 archive 4

175000 articles

I was just adding {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} to my user page and discovered that we'll probably break the 175000 mark [in the English version] sometime tonight. Congratulations everybody! Current count: 6,914,671. silsor 07:19, Nov 21, 2003 (UTC)

Nice catching that... 174989 as of now... not bad, eh? (pondering whether or not to add a couple...) -- Jake 07:26, 2003 Nov 21 (UTC)

Anybody want to keep track of what the 175000th article is? I'm going to bed now. silsor 07:36, Nov 21, 2003 (UTC)

By this rate, it'll occur in between the next 20 - 30 min. Correct my math if wrong. --Menchi 07:40, 21 Nov 2003 (UTC)

It was The Adventures of Pete and Pete when I looked, but if a page is deleted, the total will be set back to 174999, meaning something else could be the 175000th. Angela

When I just loaded Wikipedia:Village Pump, seeing the post for the first time, it said exactly:

I was just adding {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} to my user page and discovered that we'll probably break the 175000 mark [in the English version] sometime tonight. Congratulations everybody! Current count: 175001. silsor 07:19, Nov 21, 2003 (UTC)

Κσυπ Cyp   08:42, 21 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Outdated

Just to nitpick. There may not be a way of knowing which article it is, due to technical limitations (no-one bothered to code it).

That does not mean that there is not an unambiguous 175000th article. It naturally was the one to first hold that position. That is a unique honor. Others may hold that position later, but only one was the 175000th first. -- Cimon Avaro on a pogostick 08:44, Nov 21, 2003 (UTC)

In any case, I think this is GOOD. WTH, let's celebrate. It's been BHW but we are doing something right. Andrewa 09:17, 22 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Wow, it's not even two days later and already we have over 175500 articles - this means that from the 175000 point we are over 2% of the way to 200000. Has anybody been tracking the number of articles over time since the beginning? It would be nice to see what the growth looks like. silsor 17:56, Nov 22, 2003 (UTC)

More information than you could ever want: Wikipedia:Modelling Wikipedia's growth. --snoyes 18:21, 22 Nov 2003 (UTC)

This information, and much more (21 statistics for 31 Wikipedias), can be found at http://www.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/Sitemap.htm Andre Engels 01:19, 23 Nov 2003 (UTC)

This seems to be broken for the English Wikipedia. Jrincayc 15:25, 23 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Before we get too carried away, remember that only 60% of these articles are articles in any real sense, and that probably only a quarter of them are of a genuine encyclopaedia standard. See my Wikipedia Quality Survey for a discussion of this. Adam 12:40, 23 Nov 2003 (UTC)

You mean we have 43,000 articles of genuine encyclopedic standard, all written in two years? Wikipedia rocks. -- Tim Starling 13:18, Nov 23, 2003 (UTC)

I am not belittling that achievement, or the project as a whole, which I think is wonderful, since it gives me an excuse to write articles about all my peculiar interests. But I do think the 175,000 figure is a little misleading and should not encourage complacency. Adam 00:49, 24 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Awesome survey, Adam, I missed it before. It should be repeated regularly, not too regularly, and ideally the second by yourself using the same methodology. Have you given any thought to when? Andrewa 18:48, 23 Nov 2003 (UTC)

I think repeating it would just produce the same result, and would go on doing so as long as WP uses the same methodology, of allowing anybody to contribute anything they like and not having any formal quality control process. There are of course many good reasons for that methodology, but its downside is that we have to accept a crap/quality ratio of perhaps 2 to 1. Sooner or later if WP really aspires to be an encyclopaedia people can have confidence in, some kind of crap-elimination mechanism will be needed. Adam 00:49, 24 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Are you sure you mean 'crap-elimination mechanism' or 'sifter project'? There is a major difference of emphasis on those two positions. If you truly means 'crap-elimination mechanism' you are saying at some point Wikipedia should stop being a Wiki, and become organised more like Britannica and other official encyclopedias with only 'reputable' people being able to edit under certain circumstances. If it does that it will IMO kill the thing that made it great - the Wiki process. A 'sifter project' on the other hand could be seen as a kind of harmless parasite on the wiki process, which takes snapshots of valuable articles once a year(at a guess), and thus provide some form of approved Wikipedia, whose content would be one anyone could have confidence in. Such a sifter project need have no effect on the Wiki process, other than a reality check as to whether specific articles have actually improved, which would feed back on the Wiki process itself. : ChrisG 01:15, 24 Nov 2003 (UTC)

You may be right about the results staying the same. If so that's good, it means that we've reached a certain stability and that further growth should not be a problem. It would also mean that in order to improve quality, we probably need to think of something like a sifter, which I think is true, see below. But my fear is that further growth may have a negative effect on these percentages, and on some others too. Andrewa 09:21, 24 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Once again this raises the central question of who an encyclopaedia is for: is it for writers or readers? If it is for writers, then it does not matter if 25% or 50% or 75% of the encyclopaedia is badly written or inaccurate or about reptilian humanoids, because, hey, we are all having fun writing and editing and arguing about each others' articles. If it is for readers, on the other hand, then it does matter, because when readers consult an encyclopaedia, they expect to find accurate and well-written articles about whatever it is they want to know about. The main page of WP says: "Wikipedia is a multilingual project to create a complete and accurate free content encyclopedia." This suggests that one day the encyclopaedia will be complete, and that all its content will be accurate. I don't think the present process will ever reach either of those points. Adam 06:17, 24 Nov 2003 (UTC)

The point I would make about a future sifter project is that will create some kind of 'official'/'approved'/'refereed' encyclopedia that meets your concerns and the needs of some readers, but still retains the dynamic nature of wikiness. It then becomes possible to add to the latest version something like 'This is version is the latest work in progress' and create a link to an approved version if it exists'; and give some sort of official status to approved pages, and provide a link to the work in progress. It would be possible at this point to make the default setting of anonymous users the approved Wikipedia. : ChrisG 07:10, 24 Nov 2003 (UTC)

This 'sifter' concept is certainly IMO the basis of all the serious contenders for a Wikipedia approval mechanism, which is an interest of mine too as you well know. But I think it could also have a very positive effect on the 'Wiki process', by subtly discouraging much of the unproductive activity we currently need to deal with. It won't eliminate it, but I have a hunch that those involved in edit wars for example would sometimes be less interested in them if they knew that their bickering was invisible to the database view seen and used by, say, school students. The same goes for serious trolls, not mentioning any names here.

The beauty of this is, it reduces the soapbox that we give these people, but IMO won't discourage good-faith contributors at all, probably just the opposite. Andrewa 09:21, 24 Nov 2003 (UTC)

I agree Andrew. To my mind the sifter project is a way of resolving the tension between the tendencies of m:deletionism and m:inclusionism, which will only grow greater as Wikipedia becomes a more and more effective encyclopedia. Though I have concerns about the principles and guidelines which structure the sifter project to ensure that it remains meritocratic rather than elistist which I voiced with your proposal m:referees. : ChrisG 09:39, 24 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Test Wiki developer

Who exactly is this "Dev" guy at Test Wiki? He apparently possesses real sysop power like page-protection and deletion, and he seems territorial: [1] (Tim Sterling's talk page) Judging from his contri-list, he just fools around there practically everyday doing "tests/non-sense". Is this the alter ego/incarnation of some developer? It is sort of freaky when you think about it, seeing how he basically lives here for no purposes other than play like a child. And I don't mean X-File-cool-freaky. I'm curious, no insults intended (I haven't spent much time, but that's my impression). --Menchi 10:32, 25 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Have a read of the test wiki's main page Pete 11:10, 25 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Dev is just an account that I set up so that anyone could test sysop-only features like rollback and deletion. Someone was using it for trolling: writing silly messages on the test wiki main page and elsewhere, deleting people's user pages, etc. So I blocked the whole class B subnet :) -- Tim Starling 13:52, Nov 25, 2003 (UTC)

Redirect page

Should we list the redirect pages which redirect to non-existing page on the VfD? --Yacht 09:15, Nov 25, 2003 (UTC)

No, please list them on Wikipedia:Redirects for deletion. Angela

Is this allowed? See: Karkikailash --Yacht 09:27, Nov 25, 2003 (UTC)

It's not not allowed. If the redirects are old they are usually kept (not wishing to break links and all that). If they are new (like in the last few days), then normally the user would be told and then the redirect deleted in a day or two, which is what I expect will happen with this one. Angela 10:03, 25 Nov 2003 (UTC)