Bryan Derksen wrote:
Cheney Shill wrote:
It seems like there has been an extended and unstated policy to create essentially article shells simply to get the article count up and increase Wikipedia's popularity.
I've created my share of stubs and this is not even remotely the reason why. In most cases it's because I went looking for an article, didn't find it, and wanted to get it started so that hopefully others would add more detail. Why should I care about Wikipedia's gross article count?
Assume good faith, please.
Even if we accept Cheney's premise the practice he describes is likely to be ineffectual. It might work with a small website with less than a hundred pages, but in a site with millions of pages the effect of these meaningless stubs will be trivial.
The alternative seems to be to continue to be the rear end of jokes about knowledge by consensus and hearsay like that on the 1/24 Colbert Report until WP loses what trust it has.
That's a false dilemma. While it's true that there are plenty of jokes out there about it, there's also a lot of respect and admiration as well. I don't see any big risk in continuing as we have been.
When you're big the jokes are a natural part of the landscape. You can't do anything about them.
Ec