[WikiEN-l] Totally unscientific investigation...

[Matt Brown]

On 11/15/05, kosebamse at gmx.net <kosebamse at gmx.net> wrote:
> As soon as they stray away from the featured article
> on the front page, or happen to run into the random pages, their impression
> will be not favorable. That's what I tried to find to out with my twenty
> random pages.

I submit that the vast majority of the truly awful pages on Wikipedia
are very hard to find without the Random Page function, because
they're very poorly linked into the site.  There are many substandard
articles on important topics, but much fewer that are utterly
horrible.

> But it IS getting in the way. I have recently spent several hours patrolling
> the newpages and recent changes, and that was a very sobering experience.

Another point of view is that it's getting in the way of only those
editors who patrol New Pages.  The flow of new pages is not so large
that we are having trouble coping, and the harm of most of these is
minimal, since they're not linked into the rest of the site.  The only
reason to patrol New Pages at all is that it's easier to weed out the
utter crap at the point of entry.

> Another thought experiment: What if we shut down new page creation for a
> year? Simply declare 2006 the year of quality improvement and accept no new
> pages until 2007.

Frankly, if we did that, I quit.  I'm sure I'm far from alone.

> But we could start lifting the quality of the average article to where it belongs,
> and we would have a chance to lift our reputation beyond the "public toilet"
> image that has deservedly been bestowed upon us.

You care too much about the public image, frankly.  You hear the
complaints louder than the praise, and louder than the silent praise
of all those people who, day after day, use Wikipedia for information.

Some parts of Wikipedia are frankly awful, yes; I submit that a good
proportion of them don't matter.  They're on topics nobody gives a
damn about.

Making the barriers to entry harder is a tempting thought, but among
these newbies and dabblers are tomorrow's admins and writers.  A small
proportion of them, granted, but making it harder decreases the flow
of good people as well as bad people.

Yes, I'm an eventualist.  From my point of view, Wikipedia has a long,
long way to go, and that's not a bad thing.  It's that the sum total
of useful human knowledge is so vast.  There are many subject areas
that Wikipedia's coverage is scant or wholly lacking.  Yet, at the
same time, there are articles on Wikipedia that are better than ANY
other online resource.  I am sure there are some that are better than
ANY published article, on or offline.  Isn't that something to feel
good about?

-Matt