Article count reform/eml

This page is a translated version of the page Article count reform and the translation is 0% complete.

This page dates from 2003 and is obsolete in the sense that the reform discussed below has now been implemented. It is preserved (along with the vote) for historical purposes. For more up-to-date information, see mw:Manual:Article count and Article counts revisited (2015).

The problem: Currently (2003), 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.

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)

The idea is good for blank pages but I think that the small stubs should be counted. {As they are important for small wikis}. Vibhijain 15:03, 8 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

As long as you have one link. Including a link in your stub template that point to a page explaining what is a stub. That's all what matters.

This information is what we're looking for in id.wikibooks. We were puzzled because many lengthy articles were not counted. Now I wonder if there are editors from other projects that bumped into this issue too. To help them in the future I would copy this into mw:Manual:Article count. ✒ Bennylin 05:47, 13 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

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.