Talk:Wikimedia press releases/English Wikipedia hits milestone 1 million articles

A few points

I think the number of languages is fine left at "over 120". It heavily depends on what metric you choose as to how many are considered active. Of the 197 listed at en:Wikipedia:Multilingual_statistics, 43 have had less than 10 new articles in the last year and about 50 (not entirely overlapping) have had no new articles in the last month reported. More would be excluded if the threshold for being considered "active" was set at 5 new articles a month, etc. Also, should we mention we are a top 25 website according to Alexa, or do we think the drawbacks in their data measurement (only IE, English speaking people with the toolbar installed, etc) are too much to make it worth mentioning? - Taxman 12:14, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

Metrics. I realized while reading the list that it's time to take a clear stand on what metrics we use for classifying the progress of the projects. Here are a few that need clarity. The 'language' question seems like an easy one.

1. "# of active languages" -- # of languages with over 100 articles. This is a pretty good cutoff for languages that are "no longer embarrassingly incomplete". Currently 126, which is "over 125".
2. "# of languages" -- just having an active domain should not count. This could be the # of languages with over 10 articles. Many of the languages with only 1-2 articles actually have no content in the target language; and only vague attempts at producing the same.
3. "# of contributors" -- at least the # of people who have edited 5 times in the past month. We probably want something like the # of people who have edited more than 10 times ever, which Zachte tracks (>120,000 by now).
4. "top [N] website". For now, we can say "top-25 website, according to Alexa," or "in Alexa Internet's list of the 25 most-visited sites on the Internet," because we have no better data. It would be stronger to say something like "top-25 website, according to Internet traffic monitors Alexa Internet, HitWise, and Nielsen[sic]," and we should start asking for this kind of data from these companies. (HitWise, for instance, has offered us regular reports in the past.)

I'm in favour of the 10 edits all-time, and just leaving it at 120 languages and not even mentioning how many inactive we have. Most people out there can't even name 100 languages, so they'll be impressed even with a smaller number. -- user:zanimum

Jimbo quotes

We should be tightly focused on the quality of our coverage and content. The goal of Wikipedia is to create and distribute a freely licensed high quality encyclopedia. The path to that goal will require us to be flexible and thoughtful. The first steps will come soon with the article review system, which will initially be used simply to gather data. After we have data, we can begin to work on how we will focus our attention to improve quality.

Nothing is ever finished. Human knowledge is always growing.

I think we'll eventually see a tapering off of new article creation in the large language Wikipedias as more and more "verifiable" topics are covered. At this point, most changes will be expansions and updates and quality improvements to existing articles. But in 10 years, it seems likely to me that many languages which are now quite small will have very large Wikipedia projects. Our community will continue to become more diverse as more and more people worldwide come online.

Millionth article

Identifying milestone articles gets harder as the rate of addition and deletion speeds up; it's easy to cross the 1M threshhold many times in a few minutes. What to do about this? There are some scriptable solutions; or we can just pick one from among a set of the 5-10 candidates... Sj 23:43, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

Hmm... perhaps we won't want to declare a dictdef as our millionth, so hopefully one of the candidates will get expanded a decent amount within a few hours of having reached the milestone, so that news outlets won't note that our millionth article is kind of sad-looking. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 01:58, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, it's somewhat hard to define which article is the 1,000,000th, especially with all those deletions. --169.229.98.90 22:09, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

Sounds like a plan. -- user:zanimum

The counters are inaccurate (not to mention meaningless). If you need to pick some particular article for fake publicity, just pick whatever one you want; don't waste your time trying to identify "the" one. --brion 08:19, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

Fake publicity? Is there such a thing? I'm setting up a log, I don't know what we want to do with it exactly. I'm worried about making it public not just for publicity reasons, but also because people will try to flood the servers with crap new articles just as the number comes up. -- Tim Starling 05:40, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

Well again it depends heavily on the metric chosen, but why not just pick the first article after some counter shows a million that's on an obviously valid topic, and not a clear speedy candidate? If it's a short article it will get expanded quickly due to the publicity, so no worries there. But don't spend much time on it based on the uncertainty involved. - Taxman 16:47, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

Agreed. My idea of the perfect article, if there is any choice/fudging to be made, is one that can't be used to "prove" us as a haven for fancruft, but still is a topic that is too indepth for Encarta, World Book, Britannica to look at in their resources. -- user:zanimum

These are exactly my concerns. What if the 1,000,000th article was some vanity page? --169.229.98.90 22:07, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

Basically, we should choose an article no more than 20 before the marker, and no more than 125 after. Arbitrary but decent numbers. -- user:zanimum

That works. - Taxman 16:47, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

I happen to know of a perfectly valid, encyclopedic article (on a topic related to my PhD research) that doesn't exist yet (110,000 hits on google). I could cook one up and save it at the correct time, if you want. Raul654 19:58, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

There's a topic relating to electrical and computer engineering that we don't have yet? ;-) Please do, we'll definitely include it among the front-runners. You are a good, dedicated Wikipedian, so if any media attention came your way, it would be a lot better than if it came the way of someone random. Not that that's a real editor, but you get the idea. -- user:zanimum

Image count

Commons is at over 450,000 images, and en: has a half-million of its own. Not sure if it's worth making the distinction between the two. Stan Shebs 00:56, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

If there's likely not too many duplicates, just make it all one figure. The media likely would just get confused or distracted if we made any distinction. -- user:zanimum

Links

Seems like Wikipedia:Portal/Directory might be a more appropriate link for the press than Wikipedia:Portal, which contains a lot of how-to on how to make a portal. 140.247.156.29 03:19, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

Actually, I think this has way too many links in general. It ought to be in a format that can easily be distributed offline without losing information. That goes for the way URLs are formatted too, I believe, wiki markup should probably be avoided. --Michael Snow 07:15, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

Agreed, and started to be executed. Again, journalist don't have time or need to be distracted from the big picture, or the big number. -- user:zanimum

The timeline example

The current timeline example is about a political party, and a controversial one at that. Could we replace it with another? Zocky 05:00, 1 March 2006 (UTC) Has been removed since. Zocky 05:56, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

We just need to make sure it get removed from all the other languages too. -- user:zanimum

Template for wikipedias in local languages

Since we're translating this for media in other languages, it would be good if translated press releases included some information about wikipedia in the local language. Can somebody provide a useful template? Zocky 05:42, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

good idea, I have included while translating Arabic page a link for the Arabic article about Wikipedia along with the English one. This would be a good start to include in all translations --Mido 12:28, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

Awards

Were the listed awards given to Wikipedia or Wikimedia? The sentence now says Wikimedia, but is under "About Wikipedia". Zocky 05:57, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

Changed. Only one is actually Wikimedia in general, I believe, the Japanese one. -- user:zanimum

Copied

I have copied this over to the Foundation site with the other press releases. See http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/English_Wikipedia_Publishes_Millionth_Article Raul654 23:30, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

Are we going to stay...

...with a possible permastub? -- user:zanimum

I don't think we have a choice. It's not like we can put the genie back in the bottle. Raul654 23:59, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

Oh, it's actually pretty good now. Nevermind, and please ignore my post on the WMFCC mailing list, CC members. -- user:zanimum

Near misses

It was nice to mention some of the near miss articles, including one by Raul654 and one by BorgHunter. The third was created by Daniel Bush, a relatively new user (first edit on January 27th) who has been making some very good contributions. NoSeptember 00:41, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

made some changes

I've made some changes that will hopefully make the press release look prettier. If you don't like the changes, please feel free to revert them. --169.229.98.90 09:51, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

Good coding changes, thanks. -- user:zanimum

Jimbo's travel means no interviews for a while

• Moscow, March 2-5
• FT Digital Media, London, March 6-7
• Washington, DC, March 8
• New York, March 9-11
• SXSW, Austin, Texas, March 11-15
• Art Design Conference, Los Angeles, March 23-25

Should we note on the release Jimmy won't be available for interviews until the 8th, earliest? Morea likely the 16th. Do we even outright mention about his speaking engagements in the body of the release? -- user:zanimum