[WikiEN-l] RE: Totally unscientific investigation...

[Brown, Darin]

> Message: 5
> Date: Tue, 8 Nov 2005 06:38:36 -0800
> From: "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com>
> Subject: RE: [WikiEN-l] Totally unscientific investigation...
> To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> I have formatted your user subpage into a table, for easier viewing and
> consolidated your results:
> 
> 7 bad:
>   2 fancruft,
>   1 not of encyclopedic standard,
>   1 list of marginal interest,
>   1 needs work,
>   2 non-articles
> 
> 8 stubs:
>   3 salvageable,
>   4 average / acceptable,
>   1 decent
> 
> 5 good:
>   3 decent or fine,
>   2 acceptable / "short but informative"
> 
> Based on this, I give Wikipedia a score of 25% - a failing grade.
> 
> But all is not lost. If we mark articles as bad or stub, we could keep
> them somewhat hidden from the public.
> 
> Volunteer contributors could see them, of course, by "opting in". Everyone
> else (call them "general readers") would be told that we don't have an
> article on the subject yet BUT that we are working on it.
> 
> "And would you like to see the work in progress?"
> 
> Ed Poor
> Quality Maven

Are you being facetious?? If that were put into practice, nothing would
improve! The reason articles improve is *because* people see mediocre,
"failing" articles. "Shielding" them would only shield them from
improvement.

Besides, last time I checked my math, 25% of 800,000 was 200,000. That's
more *total* articles than we had less than 2 years ago. So, another way to
look at it is, in less than 2 years, *every* article has been improved to
"good". *100%*.

darin