[WikiEN-l] Totally unscientific investigation...

[Jimmy Wales]

kosebamse at gmx.net wrote:
> Thanks for the feedback. One interesting point with my little test seems to
> be that the average quality of our content has not much improved since March
> (or since 2003, as far as I can remember). 

Of course this is because the volume has increased so much.  I think if
you took any random 20 articles and compared them to their predecessors
2 years ago, virtually _all_ articles would have improved.  The only
articles that might have declined in quality, I think, would be some
feature articles which have now fallen into a contemporary edit war, etc.

> A thought experiment: if we were the editorial committee of an encyclopedia
> to be written from scratch and were given Wikipedia's current content as a
> basis (but not the user base), what would we do? I guess we would put our
> energy into improving the material, i.e. rewriting/deleting/merging most of
> it. But we would not try to acquire more articles of that quality. (Ah wait,
> we ARE the editorial committee of an encyclopedia to be written from
> scratch...)

I think this is a brilliant observation. :-)

I absolutely do think that acquisition of huge numbers of additional
stubs on increasingly narrow topics ought not to be a priority, and
certainly ought not to be allowed to get in the way of quality
improvement on existing articles.

(At the same time, of course, it's worth pointing out that there's an
easy mental trap to fall into... assuming that time people are spending
working on obscure fancruft could in any way be diverted into increasing
the quality of other articles.  That's probably not true.)

--Jimbo