kosebamse(a)gmx.net wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
The problem is that we peaked way too early. The
site is late-alpha or
early beta at best, and should have big 1995-style yellow and black
"UNDER CONSTRUCTION" GIFs with really bad aliasing on most pages.
The even more basic problem is everybody and their dog laments about article
quality, yet nobody is bold enough to tell the world that we have already
way too much garbage and can't even tell what is garbage and what is not. It
has long been obvious to the insiders, and I am actually amazed that the
rest of the world is only now beginning to realize it. Wikipedians need to
realize that no amount of mediocre-to-shitty articles can compensate for a
lack of quality content.
A helpful approach would be to stop accepting new articles, take our
content, scrutinise it and rewrite it from zero. Rewrite the encyclopedia
and let the warriors/nutters/clueless kids have their fun, but not on our
servers. Ah, the charm of radical solutions.
An even more radical, but ultimately rational, approach would be to
admit that the Wikipedia experiment is a disastrous failure and shut the
site down completely and permanently.
A project with two equally important goals that are utterly incompatible
by definition -- why was it launched in the first place? Wouldn't any
rational observer have seen a result like this as not only possible but
likely, if not inevitable?
The USA Today article makes a case not just for the obliteration of
Wikipedia but ultimately for taking down the Internet itself.