[Foundation-l] Re: User Rights

Fri Jun 18 14:57:21 UTC 2004

On 6/18/04 4:36 AM, "Viajero" <viajero at quilombo.nl> wrote:

> On 06/18/04  at 09:31 AM, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> said:
> 
>> I know a few users who started by creating a page, because they knew
>> something about something that didn't have an article. Generally as an
>> anon user. Why should they bother waiting a week? What's in it for them?
> 
> I would turn the question around: what is in it for us?
> 
> Maybe three years ago, when the project was just starting and it was important
> to build momentum, we needed every contributor and contribution we could get.
> But now we have ~300k articles, many of which still need lots of work,
> thousands of regular users, and a database which is unable to keep up with the
> demand, no matter how much hardware we throw at it. Maybe we should start
> thinking in terms of quality rather than sheer quantity.

This argument was made when we have 20k articles, & 100k...and will be made
when we have 1 million articles....

Wikipedia is not something which needs to be protected from the outside. The
only genuinely weak point is the database infrastructure, but considerations
on that behalf shouldn't be confused with policy decisions on mission
purpose.