[WikiEN-l] Totally unscientific investigation...

[Matt Brown]

On 11/15/05, kosebamse at gmx.net <kosebamse at gmx.net> wrote:
>
> Wikipedia needs more dumping grounds. We have seen that with trolls, some of
> whom now spend their energy for the benefit of mankind on consumerium.org
> and elsewhere. If people redirect their "fanwanking" activities to sites
> outside Wikipedia, all the better.
>
> Our central problem these days is the shitty quality of so many articles.


> Just now I caught two conspicuous errors on today's featured article, and
> that's supposed to be the best work that we can offer.

The featured article process tends to be more about style, writing
quality, being reasonably cited, and having pictures that are free. 
Not much involvement of subject matter experts that weren't already
working on the article.  Maybe there's a way to improve that - ideas?

> Another example: [[Fantasy literature]] of all things, is an absolute non-article.

Because it's hard to write such an article in a NPOV way.  That's one
big mountain of research to get right; no wonder most editors have
ignored it.

> As long as we can't correct these and similar deficits, we don't need more
> articles, and we certainly don't need more 20 kb articles about the hiding
> tactics of some unknown ugly imp in an unknown video game

Would that such articles were 20 kb, rather than the two sentence ugly
stubs most of them are.

Problem is, as Jimbo already stated recently - it is a fallacy to
think that preventing new articles or restricting their creation will
make anyone work harder on what you would rather they were working on.
 Writing a free encyclopedia, like writing free software, is a matter
of scratching one's own itches and doing what pleases oneself, for the
most part.  The proportion of people who will selflessly do "what
needs to be done" instead of what they'd like to do is vanishingly
small.  Fortunately, the proportion of people who LIKE doing these
tasks is higher than one might think, so progress is made.

-Matt