File talk:Lessons from Citizendium.pdf

Median article length

Copied from my talk page:)

Re citizendium article length, is Wikipedia's median value not showing the same trend?

Also, wouldn't a better graph be a composite of (total articles * median length), which is basically total words over time. 69.142.154.10 00:39, 29 July 2010 (UTC)

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(You are referring to en:Wikipedia_talk:Wikipedia_Signpost/2010-07-26/In_the_news#Citizendium and [1].)

I don't know if there are analogue statistics available about Wikipedia's median article size. But (as I remarked in the comments to the same slide), the mean article size (in bytes) has been steadily rising on the English Wikipedia [2] and on most other Wikipedias: German[3], French [4], ... - so I assume that their median has risen too.

(Don't confuse median and mean.)

By the way, apart from Sanger's 2007 call for stubs that I mentioned in the presentation, an additional explanation for the trend has been attempted here - not 100% plausible IMHO (as far as I know there are still articles being imported from WP; in any case doing so has become much more feasible since WP's license change last year), but worth noting.

The "total words over time" are available at citizendium:CZ:Statistics#Word_count. I agree that a plot for this or its derivative ("Words per day") might be interesting, too.

Regards, High on a tree (talk) 17:18, 29 July 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for moving this around. I did mean median. Great to have statistics to look at for these interesting and contentious claims. 69.142.154.10 11:54, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

Someone at Rationalwiki (where Citizendium is one of the articles featured intermittently on the main page) has made a newer chart of the median article size. Regards, High on a tree (talk) 02:46, 2 September 2010 (UTC)