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This page (revision-48) was last changed on 26-Sep-2007 09:43 by ChuckSmith  

This page was created on 09-Jan-2007 20:10 by RadomirDopieralski

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At line 470 added 14 lines
I did a little experiment: I downloaded the backup of the english wikipedia's all pages, and looked at the percentages of both styles of 1st level lists in them. Unfortunately, I was able to only extract about 6.3GB of text, as I ran out of disk space. Anyways, I hope that the sampling is not biased because of that.
In the sample I checked there are {{{1 763 983}} first level list items with a letter (a-z, A-Z, 0-9) immediately following the asterisk. The average length of these items is 90.2 characters or 12.3 words. 80% of them didn't have a space in front of the bullet too.
There are {{{4 863 709}}} first level list items with a space or tab immediately after the asterisk. The average length of them is 81 characters or 10 words.
There are also {{{5 381 592}}} first level list items with neither a space or a letter right after the bullet (nor an asterisk, of course). 25% of them were lists starting with bold or italic text.
This means, that over 26% of list items start with a letter immediately after the bullet, and over 57% of 1st level list items didn't have a space after the bullet. This is an enexpectedly high result.
I didn't mean to count the average length of the entries, but I used {{{wc}}} without any parameters, so this data came for free. I found it interesting that spaceless items are on average longer than the "spaced" ones. I went to several randomly picked pages, and checked their history. It turns out that the list items wereinitially paragraphs, but somebody decided that they look better with a dot in front of them, so he went trough the source and added an asterisk at the beginning of every paragraph. I don't know in how many cases it was what happened, but one is sure -- the experienced users will use the minimal markup that works -- especially when reformatting existing text.
-- RadomirDopieralski, 2007-02-09
Version Date Modified Size Author Changes ... Change note
48 26-Sep-2007 09:43 34.86 kB ChuckSmith to previous restore
47 26-Sep-2007 01:40 34.872 kB 203.69.39.251 to previous | to last
46 04-Apr-2007 22:52 34.86 kB Gregor Hagedorn to previous | to last Please reopen discussion, focussing on user needs rather than programmer needs
45 22-Mar-2007 16:17 33.222 kB YvesPiguet to previous | to last Nothing wrong
44 22-Mar-2007 15:32 32.74 kB RadomirDopieralski to previous | to last what is exactly wrong?
43 02-Mar-2007 00:47 32.502 kB MicheleTomaiuolo to previous | to last Email-style emphasis
42 01-Mar-2007 12:35 31.96 kB RadomirDopieralski to previous | to last clarity
41 01-Mar-2007 12:01 30.065 kB Janne Jalkanen to previous | to last
« This page (revision-48) was last changed on 26-Sep-2007 09:43 by ChuckSmith