User:Xbony2/badnumbers

This pages talks a bit about how comparing numbers like edit count can be bad/misleading.

Wiki vs. wiki
"Which wiki is better, the official wiki or the unofficial wiki?"

How much this matters is another question, particularly if you aren't an editor (I have a rather predictable answer in my FAQ if you want to know my opinion, which also happens to link to here). But one of the first ways to attempt to answer this question (or one of the first ways someone might) is by asking another question, "which wiki is bigger?" The most obvious way is try to look at the article count or to go to Special:Statistics. However, each statistic can inflated for various reason or be generally bad for comparisons; that's more or less what this page is about. Let's go through each statistic and see what's up with them
 * Content pages (which is the article count) can be inflated/bad for comparing for various reasons:
 * Here on the FTB Wiki we have material pages, such as Aluminium and material form pages such as Ingots. Instead of having an article for Aluminium Ingot, Aluminium Plate, etc, we simplify and centralize it by having articles on just each material and each material form, and leave behind redirects. On the wiki that shall not be named, they sorta have material pages, but they also have an article for each item, although here we would believe it to be unnecessary. It's the same amount of information but with a different amount of articles. As of the current revision of the Aluminium page, if we did one article per item there, we'd have 62 (!) articles. The biggest material article that I can think of at the moment is probably the Copper article, and if we did one item-one-article there, we'd have 150 (!) articles. The average material page probably has a lot less, but you can see how we would have many more articles if we did it a different way, even though that way would be much more complicated and hard.
 * (wow all these indents) But, how much would the difference really be? You might be surprised. On the popular Chinese modded Minecraft wiki-like website www.mcmod.cn, their GregTech 6 section has 17,255 (!!!!) pages on GregTech 6. Yes, they're mainly components. Most of them were made via bot (I believe, there's no way they did it manually). And I'm not even sure that's up-to-date with all of the stuff GregTech 6 adds. As of the latest version of GregTech 6, it looks like it would be 24,101 pages. So, um, yeah, if we did that, our article count would be multiplied by a significant factor. It would be pretty crazy. We would also have to disambiguate these for GregTech 5, Thermal Foundation, etc. Disambiguation between GregTech 4 and 5 is partially what recently caused the wiki that shall not be named to have like a thousand more disambiguation pages than us (which count as articles, btw).
 * On a similar stroke, we more often keep together dyed items. For example, see Magenta Mana Petal on the unofficial wiki and Magenta Mana Petal here. Rather than have 16 different articles we just have one for Mana Petals since they're the same.
 * On this here wiki, we allow translations and this of course makes the article count larger. Chances are most people only care about English articles. Should Avaritia/zh-cn count as an article? We'll leave that up to you. However, because of the way our translation extension functions, every page marked for translation automatically generates an "/en" page (for lack of a better name), such as Avaritia/en. This article contributes nothing and is only required because of that technical reason. There's hundreds of /en pages that are counted as articles.
 * Quality! I'm sure you've all heard of "quality over quantity." For example, we currently have about 400 articles marked as, whereas the unofficial wiki has (!) 1700 articles marked as stubs. I suspect they use that category as a catch-all for articles with spelling and formatting issues and whatnot, and some of those probably aren't very stub-y, but my point still stands. A complete article is better than a stub.
 * Pages can also be inflated/bad for various reasons:
 * Do see "uploaded files" under this. It's probably the majority of the pages on the unofficial wiki.
 * Because of the way they're set up, translated pages make a lot of pages in the "Translations:" namespace. See here. This is probably the majority of the pages.
 * Uploaded files. Woah, dude! The wiki that shall not be named has a shit ton of files! What's up with that, dude! Well, the majority of their files (and the majority of their pages in fact) are grid files, like this one here. On this wiki, we use tilesheets. Basically all of the grid/tile images for each mod are part one image, like File:Tilesheet GT5 16.png. At the moment we have about 270,000 tiles registered in our database. That's a lot of images that we would hypothetically upload if we did something similar to the wiki that shall not be named (and many, probably even most other gaming wikis) did. Our tilesheet system saves a lot of time, but it also allows navboxes to load faster since only one image is loaded instead of possibly hundred. Anyway, moving along...
 * Page edits since Feed The Beast Wiki was set up (edits for short >.>) can be inflated for the same reasons the number of articles can be inflated.
 * Quality (again). This applies to edits even more than articles. Not all edits are equal; not even close. For example, this edit (the creation of the page) took much longer to do than this edit (which took like two seconds). And bot edits really don't that many seconds at all to do! Like the time I typed  to help delete that category. Typing that command took three seconds (or so) and it modified ~400 pages, adding 400 edits to our count. According to my count, if it may interest you, bots edits make around 30% of the edits on this wiki. That's a large amount. It does take effort to program, execute and configure bots, so they're not worth nothing, but the average bot action takes less time per edit to do than the average action made by a user.
 * I'm not sure how it is on the wiki that shall not be named, although one of the members there implied he used his own account for some bot tasks related to disambiguation. As such I suspect it would be difficult to measure what percentage are bot edits. But regardless, most of our edits (both of us) are minor edits, such as spelling fixes, disambiguation and link corrections. This is how it is on most wikis, in fact.
 * Translations. Because of the extension we use, translating a page such as GregTech 5 would take about 20 edits. This is a lot compared to the amount of edits that making that page would take. It's a bit weird like that.