On 11/15/05, kosebamse@gmx.net kosebamse@gmx.net wrote:
Wikipedia needs more dumping grounds. We have seen that with trolls, some of whom now spend their energy for the benefit of mankind on consumerium.org and elsewhere. If people redirect their "fanwanking" activities to sites outside Wikipedia, all the better.
Our central problem these days is the shitty quality of so many articles.
Just now I caught two conspicuous errors on today's featured article, and that's supposed to be the best work that we can offer.
The featured article process tends to be more about style, writing quality, being reasonably cited, and having pictures that are free. Not much involvement of subject matter experts that weren't already working on the article. Maybe there's a way to improve that - ideas?
Another example: [[Fantasy literature]] of all things, is an absolute non-article.
Because it's hard to write such an article in a NPOV way. That's one big mountain of research to get right; no wonder most editors have ignored it.
As long as we can't correct these and similar deficits, we don't need more articles, and we certainly don't need more 20 kb articles about the hiding tactics of some unknown ugly imp in an unknown video game
Would that such articles were 20 kb, rather than the two sentence ugly stubs most of them are.
Problem is, as Jimbo already stated recently - it is a fallacy to think that preventing new articles or restricting their creation will make anyone work harder on what you would rather they were working on. Writing a free encyclopedia, like writing free software, is a matter of scratching one's own itches and doing what pleases oneself, for the most part. The proportion of people who will selflessly do "what needs to be done" instead of what they'd like to do is vanishingly small. Fortunately, the proportion of people who LIKE doing these tasks is higher than one might think, so progress is made.
-Matt