On 3/20/07, charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
The WP way has been to be free-wheeling and pick up the pieces afterwards. That's obvious. Something less obvious to most people, apparently, is that _discussing WP article by article_ misses the basic point that we write hypertext, not self-enclosed essays. You don't really 'improve' a knowledge network by stabilising it. I hear almost nothing from this angle.
The value to end users of a knowledge network is a combination of the value of each piece on a standalone basis, and of the network interlink count and quality and quality of the linked information. Article quality shows up in both terms.
Different users will have different use patterns - some will come in via Google or another external search, or a very direct Wikipedia search, to a single article, and then be done or leave. Others will spend all day hopping around wikilinks expanding their horizons.
We mean too many things by quality. Among other things, we don't really have a quantatative description for the overall value of Wikipedia, to be able to look at usage patterns and say "Oh, we need more links over here" or "This section of Wikipedia is mostly accessed one article at a time, we need to encourage article quality growth on a standalone basis".
I think that we have widespread agreement on long-term direction, but we're essentially random-walking all the individual components vaguely in that direction.
Based on articles I pay attention to, I would have to say that vandalism and spamming are more of a problem than "bad edits". I see a very few good intentioned edits that I want to edit back in a weeks' time. I see several hundred vandalisms. Stable versions would clearly help with vandalism problems. It would remove incentive for people to do it, and would make managing that which did happen much easier. I am guessing that some form of vandalism fighting takes up between a quarter and a half of all senior user time, including admins and arbitrators and staff. How much worth do we get from getting all that time back for other useful pursuits within the project?