[WikiEN-l] Newbie and not-so-newbie biting

[Carcharoth]

On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 1:04 PM, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> Surreptitiousness wrote:
>> We've lost the idea that our readers can let us know what is missing
>> by starting new articles, because we enforce standards that don't
>> reflect that given reader's concerns. Yes, there's the obvious
>> argument that if we adopted the standards of the most edits, we'd
>> allow vandalism, but that's not the real debate, it's just a snappy
>> sound bite. The real issue is what sort of resource we really are. I
>> think the writer of the essay has a real point when they say
>> "Wikipedia is dead – the Britannica staff has taken over."
>>
>>
> I think that goes too far. I would argue that, yes, we have had to find
> a replacement for the editorial processes applied by EB and (for
> example) Nupedia. What we have not done is to prescribe these in advance
> of launching the project: we have allowed matters to develop their own
> way (for example, three flavours of deletion, rather than someone just
> nixing a topic). These days there tend to be around 100 articles waiting
> at CSD, a few of which shouldn't be there. AfD can give the wrong
> result. Systemic bias is by no means vanquished. But the complaint that
> there is some sort of editorial process, and that submissions should
> still be on a "no one needs to read the instructions" basis (no
> drafting, in particular), is a basic misunderstanding.

Maybe it should be: "Welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that
anyone can edit (but please read the manual first and check what sort
of articles we want, and please talk politely to our volunteer editors
and realise that it can take time to understand how things work around
here)"?

I *hope* the links from the taglines lead to pages that tell people that.

Carcharoth