[WikiEN-l] Potential Wikipedian growing pains

Wed Sep 21 05:30:24 UTC 2005

Andrew Lih wrote:
> On 9/21/05, Daniel P. B. Smith <dpbsmith at 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.
> 

Fr: is the worst :)

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