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