User:Tom Morris/Getting to 100,000

We're currently at 13,221. We want to get to 100,000. 100,000 - 13,221 = 86,779.

2012-01-01 is 684 days away from today (2010-02-16). That means to get to 100,000, we need to produce 146 pages per day.

This is a totally silly bit of Soviet central planning. The idea is that I've taken the number of articles (drafts, approved etc.) in each WG, then worked out what the remaining 86k of articles are proportionally. I've added some totally arbitrary and subjective weightings to even things out a bit.

Basically, how these modifiers work is as follows. The total number of 'needed' articles is constructed using the following equation:

n = 87800 * ((CURR% + MOD) / 100)

where CURR% is the current percentage of article workgroup assignments which are in that workgroup. This is because articles can have more than one assigned workgroup. Ideally, if this wasn't totally time-consuming, I'd do weighting based on workgroup positioning.

The weightings are as follows:

• Biology: -3%
  • There are already loads of great articles in biology.
• Archaeology: +1%
  • Seems important but currently under-represented.
• Geography: -1%
  • The creation of articles about places doesn't seem to need to be encouraged by this. There are currently 1,079 articles in Geography. As people create articles about other things, 'Place' articles will seem to pop up quite naturally.
• Classics: +1%
  • Classics is under-represented in my opinion.
• History: -3%
  • Without a strong nudge downwards, the number of articles required would be too large.
• Politics: -1%
  • Without a little nudge downwards, the number of articles required would be too large.
• Philosophy: +2%
  • Philosophy is under-represented in my opinion.
• Architecture: +1%
  • Architecture is under-represented in my opinion.
• Theatre: +1%
  • Theatre is under-represented in my opinion.
• Military: -4%
  • Military is - dare I say it? - over-represented. This is not a bad thing, and a -4% modifier shouldn't stop Howard or others from ploughing ahead with writing about military topics.

Tom, if you don't mind my commenting on your user page -- delete if so, but I thought it would be a good inline modifier -- I dislike the assignment of many of the articles I've tagged with military. You will find many of those articles also have Politics, and I tend to think an International Relations Subgroup would be better. Strategic intelligence, for example, is at a civilian/national level in many governments.

Think about whether the "getting to 100,000" necessarily is best founded on the existing workgroups, or a different taxonomy of knowledge. Some groups could be combined (Media and Journalism). Others might be renamed (Theatre to Performing Arts). Others, such as Robotics, strike me as more like small subgroups (mostly Engineering and Computers, perhaps with a bit of Health Sciences) Howard C. Berkowitz 16:42, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

• Robotics: +0.3%
  • Robotics is under-represented, but I'm not sure that it will be possible to write that much more about robotics. A very small nudge seems like a reasonable idea.
• Games: +0.6%
  • There is plenty of scope for articles in Games.
• Sports: +0.4%
  • Ditto for sports.

The weightings are simply to take the excess burdens off workgroups that are already well-represented and to boost a few that need a bit of help. In an ideal world, each of the 41 workgroups (excl. Eduzendium, Topic Informant and Tech Team) would make up 2.44% of the CZ articles. But absolute equality of workgroup size is not attainable - we have to live in the real world.

Now, here is where it gets fun. Try and work out what the next few thousand articles are for each workgroup! For each heading, there are two numbers: the first number is the number of articles that need to be created to match the targets, and the number after that is the number of articles that need to be created each day to do that in the time given.

I'll be adding other workgroups soon.

Philosophy (2950 / 4.31)

See User:Tom Morris/Getting to 100,000/Next 3,000 Philosophy Articles.

Visual Arts (1510 / 2.21)

See User:Tom Morris/Getting to 100,000/Next 1,500 Visual Arts Articles.

Games

See User:Tom Morris/Getting to 100,000/Next 1,500 Games Articles.