On 12/9/05, Keith Old <keithold(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Further to MGM's point, as we get more popular,
more attention will be paid
to us and we cannot afford to carry thousands of bad articles if we can
avoid it.
We already do; after the speedies have done their pass, AfD only
scratches the surface of crappy material, and human judgement being so
variable, a lot of potentially good material also has to run the
gauntlet. The only way to avoid the appearance of unencyclopedic
articles on Wikipedia and their persistence on Wikipedia is to disable
article creation. Or we can admit the obvious: that Wikipedia is a
work in progress.
But your point about Google suggests a strategy for patrolling. There
are lists of popular Google searches. Pop the top 100 of those into a
database, renewed daily, and scan google results for Wikipedia pages.
Dump the output as Wikipedia links in Wikipedia space somewhere as a
hit list, and anyone who feels like checking them can do so and take
any appropriate action. Feed back acceptable articles (not
necessarily good, as they may need cleanup) into the database so that
these can be pruned from the hit list to avoid duplication of work.