[WikiEN-l] Re: [Foundation-l] Most read US newpaper blasts Wikipedia

[Justin Cormack]

On 30 Nov 2005, at 08:33, David Gerard wrote:
>
> There's no drastic solution that won't fuck up the community  
> operations
> of the site. Running a hack'n'slash cull on the live site will lead to
> the current webcomics debacle times a thousand. We already have
> specialists in all sorts of areas saying they don't even want to  
> bother
> starting to write up something they know for Wikipedia because (quote
> from Sunday's UK meet) "some idiot will delete it *because* they don't
> understand it." Imagine that outside attitude for a thousand  
> specialist
> subjects.
>

Its a real pity that people think that stuff will be deleted. Generally
I dont think it is the case. I have had to defend articles I wrote from
AfD, but there has not been a problem (the hardest ones in some ways
are incomplete attempts to be comprehensive; I had a couple of articles
from [[Category:French wine AOCs]] up for AfD; while on their own they
might not all be that interesting, having all 500 odd will be really
useful. The best solution is to just write lots of stuff. And I  
sometimes
  write stuff thats quite obscure eg [[Metropolitan Drinking Fountain  
and
Cattle Trough Association]]. Defending things has a place.

>
>> I'm not convinced the Article Rating feature that is waiting in the
>> wings is the right or efficient way to do it. But we have to get
>> closer to the "1.0" solution. It's time.
>
>
> There isn't a fast way and article rating isn't a fast way either.  
> There
> is no silver bullet. We are early beta (usable and testable but mostly
> composed of bugs) and the real world will need to get used to that,
> because there is no way to change that in the next week or month.
>
> I suspect we'll actually be able to work better if we're not  
> flavour of
> the month.

I actually think that its too early to think about the mythical 1.0.
There is far too much missing. We should put a beta notice in, its
very fashoinable (friendster, gmail, flickr etc).

Justinc