On 11/15/05, kosebamse@gmx.net kosebamse@gmx.net wrote:
it is my belief that among the newbies ( = tomorrow's potential admins) the ratio of seriously interested users to vandals/trolls/low-potential-users has declined to an unpleasant dimension. That's of course highly subjective.
That is probably true to a degree, at least.
Furthermore, if we continue to grow exponentially (how long can we, BTW?), we will not improve the average quality of our work, as several users have rightly pointed out. In other words, we'll continue to expand an already enormous body of mediocre writing. I can see no point in that.
I think we can grow exponentially for a little while longer. The average quality of our articles is only one metric, though - another would be to, say, take a representative sampling of other encyclopedia's topics and measure how well Wikipedia shapes up. On that score, I think, we're improving.
Yes it is, and it is one of the things that makes one stay despite all the nuisances. Wikipedia has indeed a long way to go, and an essential prerequisite to mastering it is to realize that we must work towards quality, not quantity.
Indeed; and thus we must try and encourage people to work on quality.
I do think one problem is that the bar to entry for article creation is a lot more than it is for article improvement. I'm not sure how we go about fixing that.
What happended to the validation code, by the way? It's been discussed for four? five? years now and few people seem to miss it. I can't understand that.
Recent discussion on this mailing list seems to tell me that quite a few people would love to see it in, but the developers/sysadmins are cautious.
-Matt