[WikiEN-l] Re: WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 27, Issue 10

Mon Oct 3 23:26:26 UTC 2005

On 10/2/05, Mark Pellegrini <mapellegrini at comcast.net> wrote:
> The thing is - let's face it - we have all the bases covered. We already
> have
> articles on more-or-less all the topics you would expect in a traditional
> encyclopedia. The big job from now on is going to be improving those
> articles
> into something better. It's easy to write a stub; it's hard to write a
> comprehensive, well referenced article (which is what we *should* be
aiming
> for,
> not medeocrity).
>

I think you're dead wrong when you suggest that Wikipedia already has
sufficient topic coverage. Even just comparing article titles to the other
encyclopedias makes it obvious that a lot is missing. Looking at the list of
requested articles does as well. And then there's the fact that the world is
always changing. I just added a new article today on something which didn't
even exist a few months ago - the [[Open Content Alliance]].

But the reason I'm writing is to respond to your second point. Yes, it's
much easier for most people to write a stub than to write a comprehensive,
well referenced article. And yes, some of this won't ever go away. But I
think this also points to a weak point in the Mediawiki software. Adding
references is a major pain in the ass, and once those references are added
it's usually not at all clear what parts of the article are referenced and
what parts aren't, so the same work gets done over and over again. Finally,
even though there are in theory rules that people should be adding
references whenever they add substantial text to the wiki, these rules are
not at all enforced.

Maybe a really simple addition to the wiki could be made to help this - an
optional field in addition to the comments field to list source(s) for your
edit. Just a free text field, which you could leave blank if you really want
to, which would be accessible to people who want to fact-check a
contribution. Eventually we might be able to figure out how to get the
software to tie the reference to the contributed text, but just adding the
field would be a good start and less than a day's worth of coding.

Personally I agree that the featured articles candidates system, as it is
currently implemented, is not very useful. But you yourself were the one
complaining about not enough articles getting through the process. Do you
think this is because there is a dearth of good, comprehensive articles in
the encyclopedia, or do you think it's because the process of FAC doesn't
scale properly?

> -Mark
>
Anthony