[WikiEN-l] a valid criticism

Fri Oct 7 02:55:10 UTC 2005

If [[Bill Gates]] and [[Jane Fonda]] were wonderful, featured articles
then he could have picked any of the dozens upon dozens of other
biographies of major figures who haven't had a full editing treatment
from many knowledgeable editors. The "find crappy articles on
Wikipedia" game is not one we can ever win -- the person looking for
crap will find it.

The *real* criticism would be to look at featured articles and find
the crap in them. To say that "even in the self-described best of the
best, they can't get it together."

When people do that -- okay, there might be a real cause for concern.
But if they're looking at articles which just haven't had the benefit
of a swirl of interested and informed attention -- well, that's always
going to be the majority of the encyclopedia in the way things are
done here. There's no point in which the numbers on that will ever
really change. Wikipedia is not going to ever be valued for its
"completeness" or its "coherency" -- it will be valued for its
intellectual property model, its breadth, its concept, its speed, and,
in the end, some aspect of its "usefulness", which is a moving target.

But if we are truly worried about some articles being "bad
representatives", it might be nice to really explicitly prioritize
some of them. We do have that list of "100 articles which should be in
every encyclopedia" or something like that for all of the new-language
Wikis to consider as a starting point -- maybe we need to re-apply
that to EN and really get out there to encourage people to find things
on that list (or another list of some sort) which are important to get
into a "featured" state *not* because the article is necessarily
horribly flawed in some way, but because the *topic* of the article is
of a high-enough priority to the world-at-large that if we goof on it,
it'll look like a bad thing. It would also be a good way to march
towards 1.0 if people are still interested in that.

(If this is somewhat incoherent, I apologize -- it has been a long day.)

FF

On 10/6/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2005/10/the_amorality_o.php
>
> I don't agree with much of this critique, and I certainly do not share
> the attitude that Wikipedia is better than Britannica merely because it
> is free.  It is my intention that we aim at Britannica-or-better
> quality, period, free or non-free.  We should strive to be the best.
>
> But the two examples he puts forward are, quite frankly, a horrific
> embarassment.  [[Bill Gates]] and [[Jane Fonda]] are nearly unreadable crap.
>
> Why?  What can we do about it?
>
> --Jimbo
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