I get this feeling sometimes that some people are more interested in
building a "community" on Wikipedia rather than helping to construct an
encyclopedia. I tend to think that there is a notion which existed upon
Wikipedia's founding:
"Always leave something undone. Whenever you write a page, never finish
it. Always leave something obvious to do: an uncompleted sentence, a
question in the text (with a not-too-obscure answer someone can supply),
wikied links that are of interest, requests for help from specific other
Wikipedians, the beginning of a provocative argument that someone simply
must fill in, etc. The purpose of this rule is to encourage others to
keep working on the wiki."
I say this is not readily followed anymore, and I personally disagree
with that tenet, because of the sheer volume of the English Wikipedia
(almost 3.5 million articles) that will always have some sort of
positive article creation rate due to developing and new events that
occur worldwide all the time.
Anyways, I think the reason why we had something like that in there is
so that we could preserve or expand this "community" of editors.
However, that implies that a certain level of drama should always exist,
not to mention that perfection is near-impossible to achieve (though I'm
sure many of us strive to do the best we can to improve the
encyclopedia), and that one's interpretation of an article or topic
being "complete" varies.
That comes to my question regarding whether or not we are here to build
an online community or an online encyclopedia. Should we focus outwards
toward the reading/viewing audience, or should we focus inwards towards
the editors?
-MuZemike