From: "The Cunctator"
<cunctator(a)gmail.com>
On 11/30/06, Tony Jacobs <gtjacobs(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
>From: "The Cunctator" <cunctator(a)gmail.com>
>Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)Wikipedia.org>
>To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l(a)wikipedia.org>
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] GNAA Deleted!
>Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2006 14:21:21 -0500
>
>On 11/30/06, Tony Jacobs <gtjacobs(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > >On 11/30/06, Tony Jacobs <gtjacobs(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > >From: "The Cunctator" <cunctator(a)gmail.com>
> > > > >Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)Wikipedia.org>
> > > > >To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l(a)wikipedia.org>
> > > > >Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] GNAA Deleted!
> > > > >Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2006 11:32:21 -0500
> > > > >
>
>
>I'd just like to remind people that Wikipedia was doing quite well in
the
Age Before
Required Sourcing.
You may consider yourself a specialist "in well-sourced articles on
topics
>for which such sources exist" but don't tar me with that same brush.
>
>You use the words "we" and "us" a bit too cavalierly, I think.
Wikipedia
is
healthiest when it allows any number of
motivations for contributors,
rather
than enforcing a Platonic model of the
perfect Wikipedian.
You're reading a bit more into my words than I ever intended, but I'll
lay
off on the idealistic "we". I
don't think Wikipedia is healthier
without
sourcing, but I'll allow for disagreement
there. What we're dealing
with
> is
> a conflict of visions of what Wikipedia ought to be. Do we strive for
> completeness and inclusiveness or for better sourcing and higher
quality
coverage?
I identify more with the drive for quality, and I'm
comfortable
> looking elsewhere for certain topics, which can't be covered in the
way
I
think Wikipedia should.
Oh, I do think Wikipedia is healthier with sourcing. But I think you're
right -- I identify more with completeness than for restrictiveness. I
think
the idea that quality and completeness have to be oppositional is a false
dilemma. I do believe that the current trend of mega-articles does
grossly
exacerbate that conflict.
Clearly, they're not direct opposites, and I hope I didn't come across as
saying they were. However, if one raises the quality bar, more things get
left out, and if one includes certain material, the bar will necessarily
go
down. It's in that give-and-take that the conflict arises.
My take is that you can define the quality of Wikipedia to be a function of
both the depth of coverage (using that as shorthand for the whole
specific/accurate/verifiable/sourced class of concepts) and the breadth of
coverage (i.e. not missing information).
In fact, I would think that one *should* define the quality of Wikipedia as
a function of both.
Then the "quality" of Wikipedia doesn't necessarily go down when you add
more material -- though the average "depth" will go down. Similarly quality
doesn't necessarily go up when you make content rules more restrictive,
since every day the amount of potential information to be included in
Wikipedia increases by some completely unreasonable amount (thus the average
breadth goes down).
If our goal is to consistently have the overall quality of Wikipedia to go
up (or at least stay stable) then that allows us to recognize that we should
have standards for new material, but not to the degree that they overly
restrict the inflow of new material. Where that inflection point exists is
of course a matter of debate, but we can break down the relevant factors:
* what is the average initial depth of included material
* what percentage of the current universe of outside knowledge is
represented on Wikipedia
* at what rate does the depth of included material increase over time (i.e.
how fast does unsourced material get sourced, grammar improved, copyright of
images checked, specificity increase, etc.)
* at what rate does the universe of outside knowledge increase over time
(how much news is there every day?)
Again, these are all pretty damn subjective but it gives us a guide for
understanding how to consider policies or the wisdom of spending energy and
time deleting GNAA from Wikipedia or merging [[franked mail]] into
[[franking]] or [[concept mining]] into [[taxonomic classification]]
or [[Captaincy
General of the
[[Spanish
East Indies <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_East_Indies>]].