Article count reform
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This page is obsolete in the sense that the reform discussed below has now been implemented. It is preserved (along with the vote) for historical purposes.
The problem: Currently, the Wikipedia article count (used on the various Main Pages and in the multilanguage comparison) only includes articles with at least one comma. This system was designed in order to prevent non-articles (e.g. blanked articles) and very small stubs from being counted.
However, in some languages (e.g. Japanese), commas are very rare, and so the article count of these Wikipedias is very inaccurate. Furthermore, the comma criterion has driven some of the non-English Wikipedias to insert commas into articles in order to increase the count. (See: the CJK section of en:Punctuation.)
How to solve it: We need a new article count system. The question is whether this system should be more rigid or less rigid than the current one in determining what an article is. Different solutions have been proposed.
The results: Voting has been closed and the following decision has been made (note that redirects and articles not in the encyclopedia namespace will not be counted)
- An article is counted if, trimmed of all trailing whitespace (blanks, newlines etc.), it is longer than zero bytes (non-empty) AND
- it contains at least one [[wiki link]]
See this message and responses for further analysis of the voting process.
For historical interest, Article count reform vote is an archive of the actual votes.
[edit] Comments
Could you explain how an article can contain a link and be empty at the same time ? Anyway almost all stubs contain links (Bucuresti is capital of Romania <- typical stub), so it's extremely bad criterion. Taw 12:02 20 Jun 2003 (UTC)
- You're right. If an article "contains at least one link" then it must be "non-empty". So criterion 1 is redundant, and criterion 2 is the only relevant criterion. Den fjättrade ankan 21:05 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)
[edit] Additional Stats
Maintaining additional statistics is a distinct issue from article count, though often serves the same purpose (inter-language comparison, comparison with commercial encyclopaedia, marking milestones).
To avoid confusion with the above vote, suggestions have been moved to a separate page on Wiki stats other than the article count.
