Kelly Martin wrote:
Dan Grey wrote:
Does it matter? So far, the only argument advanced to say that it does is that such entries damage Wikipedia's credibility. With Wikipedia now the most popular reference website in the world, I'd say that Wikipedia no longer has any credibility issues. There may still be some whiney critics around, but no-one is listening to them, clearly!
The counterargument to that is popularity doesn't imply credibility. Wikipedia is still perceived to be noncredible by some people, who cite (amongst other things) our large population of stubs and otherwise incomplete articles. However, I suspect that these people will always find an excuse to hold Wikipedia in ill repute (do we really care what Encyclopedia Britannica or Larry Sanger think of us), and so trying to make them happy is probably pointless.
But the more complete our articles are, the less stubs and other weaknesses that we show, the less places they have to criticize us. We can say "we have more articles than (insert name of encyclopedia here)" all we want, but it's the /quality/ of the articles that counts. AFAICT, there is no such thing as a "featured substub".