On 10/16/06, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
Besides which, I don't think it's too meaningful to say that we "don't have the manpower". We have *vast* quantities of manpower, more than we sometimes know what to do with. We've currently got, on average, something like 130 edits being made each minute, day in, day out. That's almost 200,000 edits per day, and over 2 per second. Now, it's true, many of those are to talk pages, and the rest are spread out over more than a million articles, and some fraction of those are drive-by vandalism, but still.
It should be remembered that there are different categories of manpower. Manpower that will do whatever it darn well likes makes up a lot of editing. Manpower that can be controlled to a significant degree is limited as is to be expected on a volunteer project.
Wikipedia wouldn't exist in its current form if it didn't have near-infinite manpower available to it. Many aspects of Wikipedia are clearly impossible due to "lack of manpower", yet seem to work just fine anyway. In fact, Wikipedia is one of my two examples (along with, um, Microsoft) of the successful application of the Mongolian Hordes technique. (Oddly enough we still don't have an article on this technique, but the Jargon File does.)
Probably because having the massive error in naming repeatedly being pointed out by our military nerds would be depressing.