Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-12-19/News and notes

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• Per "as measured by a new quality metric developed for the project" where would I find this quality metric? Thanks --Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 04:56, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

See here and here, or indeed (for context) the early coverage in the Signpost itself. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 11:33, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

• I have just updated the "Brief news" ArticleFeedback item to be more up-to-date. I hope nobody minds (we only published 6 hours ago). - Jarry1250 ^{[Weasel? Discuss.]} 10:40, 21 December 2011 (UTC)
• What about the milestone of the Dutch Wikipedia hitting over 1 million articles, isn't that newsworthy? Or was it mentioned last week or something? Aranea Mortem ^{(talk to me)} 12:58, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

I wouldn't call this a milestone in the sense of 'something praiseworthy achieved' (disclaimer: my personal opinion). In October 100k 'articles' were added to Dutch Wikipedia by bots, end November there were 870k 'articles', now 1M ?! Nearly all of this is done by bots. These new 'articles' are mostly really taxonomy stubs, an infobox and one or two sentences (which repeat texts from the info box). With 8.3 million species above bacteria level, we can expect a lot more. On Dutch Wikipedia there are about 200 'articles' about snakeflies, and similarly for hundreds of other genuses. In the English Wikipedia most snakeflies are not even mentioned on genus or family level. Could this mass import of low notability facts even have repercussions to our Google rating? At very least the connection between article counts and human efforts spent is getting more and more shady. I'm not sure where this will bring us. If any verifiable fact merits an article, we can expect 100M 'articles' about known stars some time later. Someone suggested to replace these 'articles' by lists and add 200k redirects instead. Erik Zachte (talk) 17:05, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

I agree with Erik Z. This is surface journalism, whereas something more probing about the size/threshold-related progress of the WPs is required. Tony (talk) 17:21, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

"Promoted"

Style point: Administrators aren't "promoted," they're "elected." Use of this word implies an Overseers-and-Plantation Hands division of the project. In reality, the tool box additions relate to quality control and rule enforcement work, which is independent of content creation. New administrators are merely those voted as being trustworthy to have access to these specific tools to be used in specific applications of their Wikipedia work. They aren't "promoted." Carrite (talk) 18:55, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

I agree "promotion" is the wrong word.

I'm not convinced "elected" is the right word.

I don't think Overseers-and-Plantation Hands is the right metaphor apply to the word "promotion". I see promotion as a corporate term, which we also want to avoid, but I don't see it as relating to a plantation organization.--SPhilbrick(Talk) 23:14, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Dutch Wikipedia

Glad you didn't mention Dutch Wikipedia reaching 1,000,000 articles as in my view it's not much to be proud of with a few 100.000s of them being bot created stubs from the "animal project" with "facts" like "animal x is a species belonging to the family y and was discovered in {{{1}}} by z". Then again I don't care much about milestones, I only count my own (all handcrafted) articles and take a small bit of pride in the fact that none of the ones I created here have been deleted yet so that must mean that they at least are of value to some people. S_peakF_ree ^(talk)_(contribs) 02:36, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

Honestly? I was unaware that this milestone had been reached at all when compiling the report =) Tee hee, ResMar 05:18, 22 December 2011 (UTC).