300, 000 has arrived - but don't get to excited yet...

Stevertigo wrote:
>Daniel Mayer wrote:
>>That's right - we now have over 300,000 articles 
>>in our MediaWiki Wikipedia versions (over 320,000 
>>counting the UseMod Wikipedias). 
>
>I forget-- does this figure count 
>talk/meta/user pages?

No. Talk/meta/user/special pages /have never/ been
considered articles. As I said, the 300,000 figure is
based on the official article count of the MediaWiki
Wikipedias (we would have distributed the press
release based on the combined UseMod/MediaWiki article
count, but we weren't ready at the time...). 

>>However, we are just too darn popular already and
>>our poor server is just too overworked for us 
>>to make an official announcement of this fact to 
>>the world yet. Therefore I suggest that everyone 
>>wait until two days after our servers are upgraded 
>>before distributing any press releases (en.wiki's 
>>version will still be distributed one week after 
>>non-English distribution to even out server load). 
>
>Is this "two days" an arbitrary date, or should we
>just wait for Brion, Tim, etal.. to say "OK bring 
>em on."

It was suggested on the meta talk page for the press
release in order to give the developers time to tune
the new hardware/software combination. Your idea is
better, IMO. 

However, if the upgrades are not installed by Monday
and tuning done by Wednesday, I'm going to suggest
that we wait for us to hit the "one-third of a million
milestone" based on our combined UseMod and MediaWiki
official article count (we should hit this milestone
in about 2-3 weeks if all goes well). Also by that
time, non-English articles should outnumber English
ones, meaning that, for the first time, there would be
no majority Wikipedia (we are almost there already).
IMO, those two announcements would make for a more
successful press release. It would also give us more
time to finalize and install the logo and maybe, if
people are motivated and work fast, finally create a
good language selection portal at http://wikipedia.org
. 

--Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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