[WikiEN-l] Totally unscientific investigation...

[David Gerard]

Jimbo wrote:

>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.)


That's absolutely and incredibly not true. They write a verifiable
article about something they know, get abusive comments on AFD (for
some reason, civility and assume good faith don't work there ... the
reason AFD is so damn poisonous to the community is that it blatantly
encourages participants to assume *bad* faith) and *leave*.

They're volunteers, not employees. They will write about what they
want to write about, not what someone else wants them to write about.
You can drive them away very easily (does anyone on AFD actually want
to do this? I'd hope not), but I would say this is not a good thing.


- d.