Andrew Gray wrote:
On 21/11/05, Matt Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
They found what is pretty much the real state of Wikipedia right now; that we have some excellent articles, a fair number which are OK but need improvement, and some real stinkers. We've come a long way, BUT there's still a long way to go.
David Gerard has argued that "if we want a good encyclopedia in ten years, it's going to have to be a good Wikipedia" - the Rubicon of free-content has been crossed, and good-but-costly doesn't handle well against free-but-patchy in the marketplace (at least, not in the general public sphere). http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2005/10/more_on_wikiped.php We've come a long way, and there's still a long way to go - but the key third clause is, arguably, that we've already gone too far to stop...
Yeah. Note that that's Wikipedia *or a fork*. Could be an internal fork, could be an external one.
I do think we've peaked way too early. What we have now is an interesting alpha that should have 1995-style heavily aliased "UNDER CONSTRUCTION" GIFs on most pages, and that really isn't something you want as a top-40 website. The article rating feature won't really help this for three to six months, as we will expressly not be doing anything with the results except have them available (until we've gathered enough data to see what makes sense to do with them). Going hogwild with deletions won't hold back the tide and will piss off the actual contributors. I'm not sure there *is* a quick answer :-)
- d.