User talk:Kokiri/WQA2

"Again, like two years ago, I have used a rather convenient way to measure the length of entries."

Convenient, but meaningless, since "screen" is not a reliable unit. "As much text as is needed to fill up my computer screen" depends on your resolution, your font, and the size of your browser's frame. It wouldn't be so bad if we assumed most "screens" are comparable enough for determining whether there is less, about, or more than one screen of article available, but it becomes meaningless when you start talking about a specific number of screens. You do mention this problem in your first assessment, but haven't tried to address it yet (when you buy a new monitor, will you retrofit your measurements or turn down its resolution?)
Although counting article length by number of words ignores or distorts the contribution of tables and pictures, it is arguably still more useful than screen measurements (for one thing, it transfers to paper). Every good text editor has an option to count the number of words in a piece of text. (All editors that don't are bad, obviously. :-) I wouldn't use the length of the article source in bytes, since that introduces even more distortion for some articles (markup is rare, but when it's used it can contribute significantly to byte length while having little effect on visible length). JRM · Talk 19:23, 18 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the feedback. Screen is a very reliable measure within my assessment, but you are right to point out the lack of comparability (and you might guess that I am aware of that). The reason I used screen as a measure was to keep the assessment manageable in terms of time it takes. However, I fail to understand why my analysis should be meaningless because of the unit I chose. Firstly I do not compare the length of articles between WQA1 and WQA2, and secondly I do not see anywhere in my analysis where I would expect to get different results. Kokiri 14:23, 9 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

This is a pretty interesting analysis. One thing it spurred me to check was that there were around 180,000 articles for your first assessment and over 900,000 for this one. So the percentage of real articles the first time being 38%, gives about 70,000 real articles, and now at 34% there are over 300,000. So while we still have a high proportion of stubs, we aren't adding just stubs, but articles are getting expanded at a pretty incredible rate. - Taxman ^Talk 19:06, 22 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]