Kirill Lokshin wrote:
But the key issue, I think, is simply this: prescriptive collaboration models do not, as a general rule, work on Wikipedia. The vast majority of editors make content contributions on topics of their choice; if they're told that they *must* work on article X, they'll simply refuse.
Yep, important to remember. The "incentive" could be simply deletion; if someone says "adopt this article or it goes away", then I can look at the article and decide if I want to take it on. If I don't care about it, and nobody else does either, then why would we want to keep it anyway? It's just going to accumulate bad edits and mislead anybody who happens to read it.
Requiring adoption by a project is just a way to make sure the interest outlives the whims of any particular editor.
It *is* a different mind set. Four years ago the attitude was "every sentence is sacred" :-) and we would jump through all kinds of hoops to save every scrap of verbiage. Now the underlying theme of many discussions is what it looks like to be finished with a topic; we want the geologist's accomplishments, but not the charges and countercharges in the divorce, or we want one paragraph on a TV episode, not a minute-by-minute transcript. Deleting unmaintained articles is a further step on that road, maybe going too far, but certainly worth pondering.
Stan