[Foundation-l] Enforcing WP:CITE the Soi case

Sat Dec 3 15:03:25 UTC 2005

Hoi,
"the quality of our contributions should be excellent" and "not only 
experts should contribute". Your entry level is high. It is too high 
because you insist on contributions to be unchallengeable. You wish for 
us to be better than others, individually we are not. When we 
collaborate we may be better than most. In order to have great content, 
we first have to acquire it then some will check it, discuss it and 
improve it. It may be annotated with sources we can sprinkle our magic 
on it BUT it is an argument that we have had before..

Let me go over the same argument again: our content grows in quality and 
quantity. When you look at it, the percentage of stubs is still more or 
less the same but there are more of them. The percentage of stellar 
articles stays the same and there are more of them. Some of our projects 
have grown to the point where quoting sources is a done thing. A 
percentage of articles provide their sources this percentage may be 
growing but at some point it will stay the same.

Now here is the rub, when you insist that all our articles need to 
provide sources, you will lose our stubs. You will make the composition 
of the content different. When you only consider only the English or the 
German language wikipedia you may be of the opinion that it has enough 
content. For projects that are in its infancy like the Swahili Wikipedia 
it would be a killer. It would be a killer because we do not have the 
vibrant community that we wish for it.

Danny, indeed you are not saying that only experts should contribute but 
you do insist that contributions should be excellent. Indeed we are not 
a dumping ground nor are we a bulletin board and our history proves that 
we are not. Now you cannot have it both ways. Either you accept that we 
do our best and quoting sources is only an aspect of it or you insist on 
perfection all round. So far we have never been perfect but we have been 
striving for perfection. To me it sounds that Wikipedia is the product 
of humans and fallible as a consequence. I think this is only to be 
expected.

It is indeed great to strive to be better than other encyclopaedias. 
There biggest achievement is in the relevancy that they had in the past. 
Encyclopaedias were the embodiment of knowledge. Many people grew up 
with them and acquired knowledge that way. Wikipedia is young and its 
relevancy is something that can only be judged in the future. My opinion 
is that the projects where we are best at present may not be the ones 
where we will be most relevant. When we are able to develop Wikipedias 
in languages like Kannada, Telugu or Bambara we will develop a resource 
that may become comparable in relevancy to the encyclopaedias that we 
want to improve upon.

Thanks,
    GerardM

daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:
>  
> Gerard, 
>  
> No one is saying that only experts should contribute. We are saying that  the 
> quality of our contributions should be excellent. They should be  
> unchallengable. They should be of the highest possible quality. They should be  better 
> than other encyclopedias. After all, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a  
> bulletin board or dumping ground. As a collaborative effort, we can achieve  that. X 
> can add a fact, Y can provide a source, If there are a lot of sources,  we 
> can even create separate source pages, and even have articles about those  
> sources, as has been suggested. The sky is the limit. But under no circumstances  
> should we compromise on our quality. 
>  
> Danny
>  
> In a message dated 12/3/2005 7:46:13 AM Eastern Standard Time,  
> gerard.meijssen at gmail.com writes:
>
> Being  expert is not necessarily a bad thing. It is a bad thing when it 
> makes you  think that you 
>
>
>  
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