[WikiEN-l] Next experiment: switch off AFD for a month. (was Guardian in defense of Wikipedia)

Thu Dec 8 23:35:46 UTC 2005

On 12/8/05, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Carbonite wrote:
> >On 12/8/05, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >> By the way, I really hope the experiment of switching off anon page
> >> creation is followed up with an experiment in switching off AFD for a
> >> month.
>
> >Isn't that a bit like experimenting with not taking out your trash for a
> >month? They're both fairly unpleasant experiences that no one really wants
> >to do, but they can't be halted without some other way of getting rid of the
> >refuse.
>
>
> If the volunteer garbagemen are driving people out of the town as hard
> as they can, it would probably be less damaging to the community and
> be a REALLY GOOD incentive to come up with something less socially
> toxic. See evidence in current RFAr.
>

Look at the figures.

We get around 1500 new articles a day (this is when you count after
seven days, after the obvious nonsense has been deleted).

Running flat out, AfD is struggling to cope with around 140 deletions
a day and will probably start acting really funny at around 200.

Most new articles are, at this stage, of a quality that would cause
many of those in AfD would throw up their hands in horror.

It doesn't matter, it's a wiki.  That's how wikis work.  If we turned
off AfD for a month, maybe 5000 that would have been deleted would not
have been deleted.  But Wikipedia is growing at a rate of around
50,000 articles a month.  And most of those new articles are as bad or
worse than stuff is regularly deleted by AfD.

I suggest that we invest in technology to detect nonsense articles,
commercial spam and the like.  Mucking about with kids who write up
their school rock band or write a webzine with two enthusiastic
readers, one of whom is the editor's mom, isn't going to make a bit of
difference.  In six months time the kid will have moved on and the
article can be purged because nobody's accessing it, it hasn't been
edited  much. and one or two humans (call them sluggish deleters if
you like) have looked at the article to check that isn't an article
about Darwin's speech on worm casts (redirect to [[Charles Darwin]])
or an article about a school magazine (merge with school article) or
whatever.

AfD is ugly and quickly becoming completely useless.  And it takes up
so much of the energy of some of our most intelligent editors.  Let's
take a one month holiday from it and see what happens.  The 5000 or so
articles that won't be deleted are only equivalent to three days
normal growth.