[WikiEN-l] Potential Wikipedian growing pains

Wed Sep 21 13:41:21 UTC 2005

> 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.

My church's Encyclopedia Project will also be helping with "high
quality". We have hired editors who will pay writers substantial fees to
revise existing Wikipedia articles for inclusion in a new work to be
released in 2008. It will be comparable in quality to the Encyclopedia
Britannica, although its word count may be lower.

And of course, all such revised articles will be (must be!) re-released
under GFDL for possible inclusion in Wikipedia. It's not our aim to
create a fork. Think of a river which seems to branch into two wide
streams because there's a long island in it. After the island, the
streams converge again.

> 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)

Division of labor, Andrew. Some will write, and these are our core
volunteers! Others are good at spell-checking, copy-editing, mark-up,
taxoboxes, assigning categories, removing bias, etc.

Ed Poor