On 10/13/07, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
Oh yeah, I meant to add this but I got sidetracked. I think another part of it is that a lot of the most popular articles are reaching or have reached the limit of what a wiki process can produce. In that sense the low-hanging fruit has become the hardest to reach. It's my opinion, and it's a controversial one, that a wiki can't produce a perfect article and at some point the amount of regression is going to equal the amount of progress. If there were some way to get people to stop wasting their time on articles at that stage and focus instead on the Mzoli's Meats of the world I think there'd be plenty of growth ahead.
Other people say the exact opposite though, that we should focus on improving [[Islam]] and forget about [[Mzoli's Meats]]. And that's probably what's going to happen for the near future.
What sucks about that is that articles such as [[Islam]] probably have all the attention they need and then some. Perhaps not all the quality-focused encyclopedists they need, but such people are often driven off by the constant refighting of real-world battles.
What is lacking, IMO, are good articles on a lot of general but non-contentious topics. It's a lot easier to write an article on a very specialised topic than a general one. The specialized topic is likely to be well-bounded and of obvious and simple scope. Sources for such articles are generally easier to find (because they are so specific, they're easy to search for) and not contentious. It's a lot harder to find authoritative sources for general information, ironically, even though it's easy to find non-authoritative ones.
Working against original research is hard in a generalist article. It's really easy to write one from a personal perspective, but a lot harder to pin everything down.
-Matt