On 30 Nov 2005, at 08:33, David Gerard wrote:
There's no drastic solution that won't fuck up the community
operations
of the site. Running a hack'n'slash cull on the live site will lead to
the current webcomics debacle times a thousand. We already have
specialists in all sorts of areas saying they don't even want to
bother
starting to write up something they know for Wikipedia because (quote
from Sunday's UK meet) "some idiot will delete it *because* they don't
understand it." Imagine that outside attitude for a thousand
specialist
subjects.
Its a real pity that people think that stuff will be deleted. Generally
I dont think it is the case. I have had to defend articles I wrote from
AfD, but there has not been a problem (the hardest ones in some ways
are incomplete attempts to be comprehensive; I had a couple of articles
from [[Category:French wine AOCs]] up for AfD; while on their own they
might not all be that interesting, having all 500 odd will be really
useful. The best solution is to just write lots of stuff. And I
sometimes
write stuff thats quite obscure eg [[Metropolitan Drinking Fountain
and
Cattle Trough Association]]. Defending things has a place.
I'm not convinced the Article Rating feature
that is waiting in the
wings is the right or efficient way to do it. But we have to get
closer to the "1.0" solution. It's time.
There isn't a fast way and article rating isn't a fast way either.
There
is no silver bullet. We are early beta (usable and testable but mostly
composed of bugs) and the real world will need to get used to that,
because there is no way to change that in the next week or month.
I suspect we'll actually be able to work better if we're not
flavour of
the month.
I actually think that its too early to think about the mythical 1.0.
There is far too much missing. We should put a beta notice in, its
very fashoinable (friendster, gmail, flickr etc).
Justinc