Message: 5
Date: Tue, 8 Nov 2005 06:38:36 -0800
From: "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor(a)abc.com>
Subject: RE: [WikiEN-l] Totally unscientific investigation...
To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l(a)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