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

Mon Oct 3 23:23:46 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