Andrew Lih wrote:
On 9/21/05, Daniel P. B. Smith dpbsmith@verizon.net wrote:
Oddly enough, I wonder about the exact opposite. I fear that people enjoy creating new articles far more than they enjoy editing existing articles, and that people look desperately for topics that do not exist yet so that they can be the first to create them. The Wikipedian equivalent of the Slashdot FIRST POST!!!!
I don't think you have to look too desperately to start a new article
- as long as humans exist and make news, there will be plenty of
things to add. The next killer hurricane, the next teenage gal missing in the Caribbean, the next popular TV show, the next government official arrested for corruption, et al.
I do not think its growth will stop. The problem is, will the quality of the articles hold up? There's no obvious reason why it shouldn't, and no obvious reason why it should.
Obviously the "1.0" or rating project is an attempt to institutionalize the maintenance of high quality articles. But there may be some evolutionary reasons why quality has held up.
More and more WP articles have taxoboxes, infoboxes, templates, categories, and the like, so that when someone clicks on "Edit this page" it is more likely now than ever before, that they'll be presented with some pretty intimidating code. Just check out [[Cat]] for an example. There seems to be a higher threshold for older articles once these constructs have been placed in the code.
I used to tell folks writing for wiki was easy, and the inclusiveness of it has to do with not being like a database or data entry system. That has changed with templating now being extensively used around the Wikimedia projects.
Fr: is the worst :)