On 9/21/05, Daniel P. B. Smith <dpbsmith(a)verizon.net> wrote:
Oddly enough, I wonder about the exact opposite. I fear that people
enjoy creating new articles far more than they enjoy editing existing
articles, and that people look desperately for topics that do not
exist yet so that they can be the first to create them. The
Wikipedian equivalent of the Slashdot FIRST POST!!!!
I don't think you have to look too desperately to start a new article
- as long as humans exist and make news, there will be plenty of
things to add. The next killer hurricane, the next teenage gal missing
in the Caribbean, the next popular TV show, the next government
official arrested for corruption, et al.
I do not think its growth will stop. The problem is,
will the quality
of the articles hold up? There's no obvious reason why it shouldn't,
and no obvious reason why it should.
Obviously the "1.0" or rating project is an attempt to
institutionalize the maintenance of high quality articles. But there
may be some evolutionary reasons why quality has held up.
More and more WP articles have taxoboxes, infoboxes, templates,
categories, and the like, so that when someone clicks on "Edit this
page" it is more likely now than ever before, that they'll be
presented with some pretty intimidating code. Just check out [[Cat]]
for an example. There seems to be a higher threshold for older
articles once these constructs have been placed in the code.
I used to tell folks writing for wiki was easy, and the inclusiveness
of it has to do with not being like a database or data entry system.
That has changed with templating now being extensively used around the
Wikimedia projects.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. As articles have evolved through
Wikipedia's lifetime, moving them to more complex stages of coding has
likely kept in check some of the spurious newbie editing of these
articles one would expect with WP's explosive growth. At the same
time, it still remains easy to start an article, and to do basic
essential markup.
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)