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