[WikiEN-l] Profoundly bad idea.

Thu Dec 7 01:22:59 UTC 2006

charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com wrote:

>Robth wrote
>
>  
>
>>The problem is this: the volume of contributions to Wikipedia by
>>one-time or occasional contributors who "pass-by", as it were, and add
>>something, is far too great for the community of steady
>>maintenance-oriented contributors to keep up with "fixing" all of it
>>as it comes in.  If we're going to place the onus on these steady
>>contributors to fix all this stuff, then we're going to end up with a
>>huge pile of stuff waiting to be "fixed" that is broken in very basic
>>ways; articles with no sources, images without specific enough
>>information, etc. This is the approach we have taken up till now, and
>>huge piles of stuff waiting to be fixed is exactly what we have.
>>    
>>
>Well, you'll notice that the _unselective_ wish o have everything sourced to the hilt is aggravating this. 
>
Exactly.  Being guided by obsessive-compulsive neat-freaks too easily 
can cloud our long-term vision.

>We have always had the 'piles'. 
>
And they are a pain in the ass. ;-)

>The question is more like: are the quality initiatives proposed fit for purpose? 
>
In a normal growth environment the number of sub-standard articles is 
bound to grow too.  If this is in proportion to other growth looking at 
just the absolute number of these in isolation the problem can often 
seem worse than it actually is.  On any given article one needs to 
expect that it will itself grow over a continuum from stub to fully 
documented article, but that takes time.

>Labelling with [[Category:Living persons]] is good, because it addresses a serious issue. Fretting about the quality of pop-culture articles is fairly pointless, on that scale. Deleting dodgy images is good (my take - I'm a text person first and foremost); it is quite true that images are worth at least 1000 words, but getting the text straight is the foundation. 100K 'featured articles' - did nothing for me. Getting a page up per surname, i.e. at least 10000 dab pages of the kind most people pay no attention to: very useful, because it inherently opens up the navigation and checking.
>
I tend to be text bound too, and pay minimal attention to images.  If 
something makes it to "featured article" that's fine, but I'm not going 
to be worried about it getting there.  At one per day it will take the 
better part of 3000 years to put up 100K. 

>And so on. Just let's acknowledge that quality beefs should be prioritised.
>  
>
Absolutely.  This put higher priority on things that are potentially 
illegal or which represent a questionable POV.  Even there a POV about 
current events is more condequential than one about a video game.

Ec