Wikipedia:Articlecountitis

Articlecountitis is a disorder that affects Wikipedians, defined as an unhealthy obsession with the number of articles. It has two manifestations: one is primarily dealing with one's own article count (self article-count disorder, or SACD) which is quite similar to editcountitis, and the other is an obsession with one's home Wikipedia's article count, especially in relation to the order of Wikipedias (Wikipedia article-count disorder, or WACD), which was compiled and updated daily on Meta. (Note: statisticians are generally exempt from this, because they don't show symptoms of over-eagerness toward adding articles.)

In the first case, users try to write as many articles as possible under their own username, while in the second case users generally show an unhealthy amount of attention toward milestones, and sometimes dabble with new stub creations. But users might also employ bots to do the bulk of the task, thus their personal article count might be seen as relatively low. Their works are usually documented in the graph of article growth in that particular edition of Wikipedia by a sudden surge in the chart.

Symptoms

The symptoms for the first case are somewhat variations of editcountitis, while the symptoms for the second case are:

• Their ultimate goal is to have xxxx number of articles in their Wikipedia (usually the nearest power of 10, or multiple of a hundred thousand)
• Heavily involved with stub creating, generally in one of these subjects:
  • Administrative divisions (such as French communes, because the database is widely available)
  • Species (such as insects and plants, because of their sheer number and the availability of the databases)
  • Space objects (such as minor planets and asteroids, same reason as above)
  • Other subjects with an accessible database and a huge number of entries
• Announcing that one of their aims is to get the Wikipedia to be one of the 10 largest Wikipedias, or to join the million-article club, or 100,000, or any such number.
• Thinking that The List reflects honor to their home wiki, and that they're joining "The Race" toward the most articles. If their language has a relation to another language edition of Wikipedia, then "The Race" could be against that particular "rival".
• Proudly and promptly update The News when they hit another milestone.

Cure and prevention

The user might be cured (or prevented, if the symptoms are noticed by other users) using these methods:

• Blocks if the user (or the bot) write excessively useless stubs, and/or operating without community's consent.
• Nothing else to write about. The number of possible subjects to be written is like fossil fuel. There's a limit to them.

See also

• Wikipedia:Article count
• Wikipedia:Editcountitis
• Wikipedia:Barnstaritis
• Wikipedia:Watchlistitis

External links

• Edit counting (at the Meta-Wiki)
• Article count (at MediaWiki wiki)