On 30 Nov 2005, at 08:33, David Gerard wrote:
There's no drastic solution that won't fuck up the community operations of the site. Running a hack'n'slash cull on the live site will lead to the current webcomics debacle times a thousand. We already have specialists in all sorts of areas saying they don't even want to bother starting to write up something they know for Wikipedia because (quote from Sunday's UK meet) "some idiot will delete it *because* they don't understand it." Imagine that outside attitude for a thousand specialist subjects.
Its a real pity that people think that stuff will be deleted. Generally I dont think it is the case. I have had to defend articles I wrote from AfD, but there has not been a problem (the hardest ones in some ways are incomplete attempts to be comprehensive; I had a couple of articles from [[Category:French wine AOCs]] up for AfD; while on their own they might not all be that interesting, having all 500 odd will be really useful. The best solution is to just write lots of stuff. And I sometimes write stuff thats quite obscure eg [[Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association]]. Defending things has a place.
I'm not convinced the Article Rating feature that is waiting in the wings is the right or efficient way to do it. But we have to get closer to the "1.0" solution. It's time.
There isn't a fast way and article rating isn't a fast way either. There is no silver bullet. We are early beta (usable and testable but mostly composed of bugs) and the real world will need to get used to that, because there is no way to change that in the next week or month.
I suspect we'll actually be able to work better if we're not flavour of the month.
I actually think that its too early to think about the mythical 1.0. There is far too much missing. We should put a beta notice in, its very fashoinable (friendster, gmail, flickr etc).
Justinc