Wikipedia talk:Milestones/Archive 1

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NOTICE: This is an archive of our discussions on or before 31 December 2003. For current discussions, see the main talk page.

http://en.wikipedia.org/ and http://www.wikipedia.org/ look like they have crashed, while http://en2.wikipedia.org/ works.

The Wikipedia PageRank is now 8/10, with 60,300 back-links. Nintendo 11/7/03

2003-01-10 One million home page hits, but I just can't get myself to edit the Announcements page using it's horrific date format.


Could we get an update on the NYTimes article? It is still coming out, I hope. --KQ

I hope so too. --LMS

So is a Google PageRank of 7/10 good or bad? Where does that put us in relation to, say, msnbc, yahoo, altavista, etc.?

PageRanks of some importante pages:

Joao

OK, think i am in favour of the ditching of subs. Will there be a new standard for /Talk page though? Page name Talk  ?-- AW

I'm feeling dense here... where is the Wikipedia plugin available for AbiWord? I downloaded the current version of Abiword and there's no mention of it, and I can't find any plugin dlls in the folder. I'm on NT, and it is version 0.9.6 that I'm using.---- On www.sourceforge.net at:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=15518

at the end of the page.

Can we declare January 15 to be Wikipedia Day?

--Chuck Smith, who also enjoys celebrating Pi Day (March 14: do the math), and Zamenhof Day (December 15, birthday of L. L. Zamenhof, initiator of Esperanto).

(How about Star Wars day - May the Fourth? -- Khendon)

We could, but no one but Wikipedians would care! --LMS

Anybody know why the front page has a different count to the stats page, and which is 'right'? user:Verloren

The front page counter counts "all pages without a ':' in the title that contain a comma in the text". The statistics page substracts some page types ("talk:", pages without a comma, "wikipedia:") from the total number of pages. Thus the different results. As far as I can tell, none of them is correct, as there's no definition of what make an article countable... --Magnus Manske, Monda[y, April 8, 2002

I really don't think it's necessary to announce when we hit every thousand article mark. I think every 5,000 and other important numbers (such as 33,333) should suffice... I mean, we write about 200 articles per day, right? --Chuck Smith

It makes sense to me as a way of keeping track of the rate of change for later analysis. Of course, I'd much prefer a page like log:Wikipedia statistics history 2002 or something, that was kept up-to-date automatically... The Anome

Well, why don't you use Wikipedia:Statistics history 2002 then?  :-) --Chuck Smith

By the way, isn't 33, 333 / 100,000 ~= 1 / 3? Or are we talking in terms of time and estimating some kind of exponential or geometric growth model? :) --Robert Merkel

Somebody asked this question on the Announcements page:

How does Wikipedia work?
Is each article stored in its own file or is each article stored in its own record in a database?

The answer is: each article is stored in its own record in a database. For the nitty-gritty details on how the software works, see links from Wikipedia:PHP script. --Brion VIBBER, Friday, July 12, 2002

We hit 50,000 raw articles, but when was the last time the statistics were updated to reflect an estimated number of "real" (non-stub) articles?

Which article is number 100,000?

I am saddened on artilces mentionaing Wiktionary, they have not mentioned my name, o well c'est la vie. -fonzy

I understand the need to make archives for the past months; However, this page is not so long that it require immediate cleaning as soon as the month is over. Typically, the announcement of low german on the 30th of april could benefit not to be archived 6 days later. When the page is full, there is need for archiving. It is maybe not so urgent when there is a lot of room on the page imho. user:anthere


Moved from meta page:

  • Individual page access counters (probably gone for good)
    • please why would these be gone for good ? These are important. I don't remember them being permanently disabled was discussed. user:anthere
They were disabled for performance; a database write on every pageview to our busiest table leads to a lot of deadlocks, and sssllllooowowwwwwssssss everything down. If anyone gets around to making a more efficient way of doing the same thing, they may be re-enabled. --Brion 01:32 May 7, 2003 (UTC)
What about either increasing the number of Top urls in Webalizer or adding an additional stats program that shows more than 30 urls? Jrincayc 13:22 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)

"The new server is being configured so it will be able to provide a read-only mirror of Wikipedia on future occasions of downtime on the database server."

I thought the new server was going to be the webserver and the old faster server was going to be the database server (maybe it the other way around...). Or is the "read-only" mirror thing and interim solution? --mav
Separating the web and database servers doesn't help when the database server is dead as a doornail. :) The read-only mirror is meant to be a backup database, a slightly-behind current-revisions-only version which can be kicked online on the web machine if the database box dies. --Brion 22:25 May 9, 2003 (UTC)
But wasn't the whole point of the new machine to balance the webserver vs. database load? --mav
Let me explain: the job of serving the wiki has so far been performed by Pliny alone. Poor Pliny has to keep track of the database, and serve up web pages. We just hired Larousse to help him out by taking over the web work, so Pliny will only have to do the database stuff. But, Pliny is a hypochondriac. He gets sick a lot and misses work. When both Pliny and Larousse are doing their thing, each can do just one job with greater efficiency. When Pliny is at home in bed with a broken filesystem, Larousse either can't do ANYTHING and there is NO WIKI AT ALL, or Larousse can take up some of the slack by doing just enough database stuff to allow him to serve web pages, and people can still read the wiki until Pliny is back on his feet. --Brion 22:37 May 9, 2003 (UTC)
OK. So Larousse is not able to be all we want it to be just yet. --mav
Now I'm just confused. What is it that you think we want it to be? --Brion 23:14 May 9, 2003 (UTC)
Either the database server or the webserver. Isn't that what you'all been talking about? --mav
Yes. The point is that normally it'll do nothing but web, but if the database server is not working, it would be nice to have a backup mirror database we can kick into action to cover our asses temporarily. --Brion 23:43 May 9, 2003 (UTC)
Sweet! Best of both worlds then. --mav

The traffic spike today may have been because Wikipedia was mentioned in the most recent email newsletter from Earthlink to their subscribers. - It specifically mentioned the main page, the bus tour, and the sandbox. -- Marj 01:49 29 May 2003 (UTC)

This "Meetup" thing - is that 7pm local time wherever you're meeting? Or are we trying to do this so we're all there at the same time, and it's 7pm for some particular time zone, and if so, which one? I would expect the former, but it would be nice to specify in the announcement. Please? -- John Owens 09:43 29 May 2003 (UTC)

PageRank seems to have dropped to 6/10. Any ideas why? ... Hm, slashdot moved up to 9/10 and amazon.com dropped to 0/10. Odd. Koyaanis Qatsi 19:49 21 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Possibility of a Stubwikipedia which doesn't have such large articles in? (the Talk pages being the same length? -Adrian

What about letting an international alone for an announcement ? Is it so necessary to always compare any achievement ? besides, the english and the german are not working on the same count system, so comparisons are irrelevant. Horray for the germans :-) User:Anthere

At least for en.wiki the differences between the comma count and the link+non-zero were minor. --mav


very true. But perhaps not as true for very different languages not using commas, or for young wikipedias which may contain a bunch a very small articles. To a certain point, I think we should not put to much emphasize on nb of pages differences between the wikipedias. Numbers are great for press release of course :-) User:Anthere
There are other ways to compare, e.g.
en: holds 303 Mb text / 2,360,000 links
de: holds  35 Mb text /   323,000 links
I think both make for better comparisons of the amount of effort put into each Wikipedia than number of articles. This is not to suggest that we base official comparisons on number of links, lest people start to turn every syllable into a link to beat the 'competition'. Erik Zachte 01:18 8 Jul 2003 (UTC)
IN any case it would be not how many bytes, but how many bytes excluding HTML and markup and talk pages and user pages and special pages and stuff in alternate namespaces..... And then people will complain that non ASCII 'pedia's have an advantage because their characters take more bytes. and then the chinese will reply that they can pack more content per character than americans. and so on.. its pointless comparing Lightning 18:08 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Good points. Then there is also the issue of bots that add low quality content. The 30,000 US census articles are badly composed (a table would have been much better) and should have been filtered for significance. In my opinion the English Wikepedia contains 110,000 meaningful articles right now. Someone might use a bot to create a stub for every known star (percentage of carbon, distance to nearest star, number of scans by Seti project), and add that this is just a starting point to invite people to tell all they know about that star. But what about the links? As they are now, I feel they give a reasonable estimate for the amount of activity on a Wikipedia. Do you see any major flaws there as well? By the way, even when I agree comparing Wikipedias is risky I will still add comparison reports in my ongoing statistics project soon. Erik Zachte 10:01 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)
You know The idea of counting links originating and leading to main namespace articles is not a bad one. I think a comparison of article count which have a byte size above a certain treshold and at least 3 links, minus bot articles. combined with link count, minus pages that serve only as links to other pages (lists, and categorization pages pages) would be the most acurate count we could get... but that's just me. The links comparisson is a good idea though. I put the restrictions on it, because i believe that is the fairest and most neutral way of comparing actual content only. still not perfect, but a little closer maybe.

Good news about the de.wiki traffic spike! It shows what the power of publicity can do, and the potential for further traffic growth for the Wikipedia as a multilingual whole. The servers have stood up really well, even if they slowed down a lot under load, given that traffic is roughly 50% greater than previous record traffic levels. Should we get some more servers set up before we Slashdot the Wikipedia by announcing the Wikimedia Foundation? -- The Anome 22:58 7 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Can we buy servers fast enough to keep up with the growing traffic? --Chuck SMITH
Not without any money, no. :) However we've still got a long way to go in squeezing efficiency out of what we've got with better software. (But in theory, a faster processor for larousse -- the new web server -- ought to help. A third server to hold an alternate database and handle nothing but searches and such would also be a big BIG help.) Talk to Jimbo about money/hosting if serious about donating; I don't know what the legal/money situation is at present, or how many more machines they can cram into Bomis's existing hosting space. --Brion 23:43 7 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Proposed future announcement. Edit as you like. Post it to the announcements when July 25 hits if you think it worthy. Jrincayc 13:14 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)

July 25th, 2003

Two years ago, Larry Sanger wrote an article in kuro5hin. In it he predicted that Wikipedia might have 84 000 articles in 7 years. However, only two years later Wikipedia has more than double that (when including the international wikis).
You can now choose your preferred date format. --(Discuss)

The link doesn't seem to link to anything about preferred date format. Is something unusual going on here? - Cafemusique 22:39, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I really have a hard time believing alexia.com, if its on the verge of the top 1,000 I would expect more vandals 'n lots of them. Also most ppl i talk to about Wikipedia have never heard of it. - fonzy

Disabled: Individual page access counters

"Disabled: Individual page access counters (probably permanent)" I still belive that this could be switched on again one day. Could we delete this "permanent"? Fantasy 08:40, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I think Eloquence wrote "Permanent" to mean "in an unforeseeable future". Sounds tragic, but true. It's a neat feature, but has been given a low priority. --Menchi 00:25, Aug 9, 2003 (UTC)
OK, so I change it for now into "in an unforeseeable future" as the permanent sounds to me like a decision. Thanks, Fantasy 22:22, 11 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Passing /.?

Not to 'rain on anybody's parade', but: according to [1] we just missed Slashdot, and didn't actually pass it...
James F. 16:50, 4 Sep 2003 (UTC)

I started a discussion on wikipedia:Village Pump about alexa which may be of interest. Pete 17:41, 4 Sep 2003 (UTC)
Should we mention it on the main page, and see if Slashdot complains about the server strain from being Wikipeeded? Κσυπ Cyp   23:11, 10 Dec 2003 (UTC)
:-). I think Wikipedia being so close to Slashdot says more about Alexa than it does about our relative popularities. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 09:35, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)
The reality is that Wikipedia gets most of its traffic via contributions and search engines, so we don't have the kind of time-compressed visits to a single page that can cause Slashdot effects. We may very well be in the overall same trafic region as Slashdot, though, given that Slashdot is news/comments and nothing else.—Eloquence 10:07, Dec 11, 2003 (UTC)

Wiktionary 10,000 articles?

The Wiktionary main page claims 5361 articles, so where did 10,000 claim come from? Erik Zachte 02:44, 13 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Brion seems to have copied this from Meta. It was listed on Meta twice; once as 5000 on the 11th and once as 10,000 on the 13th by the same user. I assume only the former one is correct, going by Wiktionary's home page so have corrected it here. Angela 05:00, Sep 13, 2003 (UTC)

I did not say, "Wiktionary has reached 10,000 articles," but I wrote, "Wiktionary has reached 5,000 entries." I meant 10,000 total pages including stub pages, talks, redirects and others. --Nanshu 23:47, 13 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Why not include the 40,000 or so entries in the history database. Would be even more impressive ;) Erik Zachte 13:56, 14 Sep 2003 (UTC)

New servers

Jiihaa. Knock on wood, prayers, stroking amulet, breathing calmly and spreading good karma, that it all works fine. -- Cimon Avaro on a pogo-stick 01:56, 3 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Alexa Rank

In the Dec. 3d announcement, it mentioned that our alexa rank shot up to the 750s, after we had installed the server. This is incorrect. It was in the 750s that day before we installed the server, but dropped back down to the 950s the next day (which measures usage including the time the server was installed), probably because of people like me who stopped editing while the db was down. DanKeshet 18:59, Dec 3, 2003 (UTC)

Could the announcement of this be moved somewhere, with just a link on the announcements page? I like how the announcements here are generally only 1-2 lines, making it easy to scan through, while this one takes up nearly a page. --Delirium 22:52, Dec 10, 2003 (UTC)

Done.—Eloquence
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