[WikiEN-l] Re: cruft

Sun Sep 11 22:05:00 UTC 2005

> I think the solution is perfectly clear. We fix the articles at a
> reasonable rate....
>
> What do we really lose by having 100 mediocre-to-crappy articles on
> obscure Pokemon? I mean, yes, I lose sanity if I try to read them,
> but if they just sort of exist? The only thing I can think of that we
> might lose is some respect. Here's the thing, though - this project
> is four years old. We've built a pretty damn good encyclopedia in
> four years.

It's an equilibrium process.

Bad articles are created _at some rate_, and get fixed _at some rate._

Wikipedia is useful to me, in the areas where I have no expertise,  
_because the bad articles get fixed quickly enough, four years into  
the project, most of the articles in Wikipedia are pretty much OK._

That isn't a law of nature. It's a consequence of the _balance_ of  
the rate of various things that are happening within Wikipedia.

Wikipedia has, as far as I can tell, improved continuously over four  
years. That does not mean that this will automatically continue.  
Wikipedia's usefulness depends on articles _actually receiving  
reviews_ and the benefit of "many eyes."

If the Pokemon articles are, in fact, well-researched and accurate,  
and have received input from many editors, they're not a problem. I'm  
really not au fait with Pokemon so I've literally never looked at  
them before... Let's see... I think I'll look at a few articles  
linked from "List of Pokémon..." Hmm, they're numbered... let's look  
at 271 and 314, the first three digits of e and pi respectively...

...these certainly _look_ like _good_ articles to _me._ Not mediocre- 
to-crappy at all.

(Incidentally, it's hard to judge simply from number of edits. I was  
stunned some months ago by an article that was, if I recall, a hoax  
or close to it, that had received many edits from experienced  
editors... who had been editing only for language and style. So, not  
knowing either Pokemon or the individual editors involved, I can't  
really judge accuracy).

Are there convincing theories that say that there cannot possibly be  
a problem with low-quality articles being created faster than they  
are fixed?

Offhand I would think that avoiding such problems would require a  
general consensus that the "inclusiveness" of Wikipedia must be kept  
_in balance_ with the number of active contributors, both to  
Wikipedia as a whole and within particular topic areas. I suspect  
that's exactly what's being done in the hard-to-codify judgments of  
what's "notable."

--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at verizon.net
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/