Fastfission wrote:
But clearly "obscurity" is not the factor which determines a good or bad article. Plenty of articles on obscure people are very good and plenty articles on very simple things can be quite bad. But still, he did not, of course, give any rationale for these two articles except that they exemplify the fact that Wikipedia is edited by amateurs and sometimes has spotty content. So what?
It disappoints me to hear a Wikipedian take this attitude towards quality. "So what?" So -- we're trying to be better than this, that's what.
But nobody's making excuses here. I'm just saying that you will always be able to find sore spots if you want to. If you believe in the Wikipedia way, what you do is try to fix them or call them to the attention to others. If you don't, then you write pissy articles about them.
I don't think this is what our general response to this sort of complaint should be. I think our response should be: hey, you know what, he's right! These articles ought to be pretty decent, but they aren't. Why? What can we do to improve?
If we study it up one side and down the other and conclude that there is nothing to be done about it, then fine. But we should not just accept the current state of affairs if there are sensible proposals for improvement.
We're not making software, here -- just because some parts of it are spotty doesn't mean the entire package won't work. In that way we're a lot less restrained than the open source software projects and can afford to have a philosophy of eventualism.
I don't have a problem with eventualism -- but 'eventualism' is not the same as saying "so what?" to quality problems.
--Jimbo