On May 18, 2006, at 2:48 AM, Steve Bennett wrote:
If we don't want unsourced material, why have
we tolerated it so long?
This could be a change in what's considered acceptable rather than an
eternal law. Early in Wikipedia's development, we took what we could
get. Now that we have a crapload of content, we can set stricter rules.
Think of it like a basketball team. If you absolutely need to have a
basketball team and no one wants to join, you'll take anyone. If
everyone in the school wants to join the basketball team, you have to
set rules and cut people. True, there's a limit to the roster of a
basketball team and no limit to the amount of information Wikipedia
could have, but more importantly there's a minimum in both cases, and
when the minimum is met, you can be more discriminating.
There are other ways of accomplishing this than setting more rules. You
want to build the very best team, and that will be established by
looking at the players' activities on the basketball court. When you
have a more artificial rule that an otherwise great player must achieve
a certain level of academic results, instinct should point towards
finding ways of improving his academics instead of cutting him from the
team without question.
We want to build on the poor articles. This is usually much better than
waiting for someone to submit the perfect article on the same subjec.
Ec