On 4/1/07, Dycedarg darthvader1219@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/31/07, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
If this is done I think I'll create a mirror consisting solely of such unapproved articles, which is, of course, indexable by Google. Should get me a lot of traffic, at least until others figure out what I'm doing and do the same.
You really think a dumping ground of everything Wikipedia won't publish because there's a good chance it's crap will be that popular?
Define a "good chance". Wikipedia has hundreds of thousands of unapproved biographies. If I went through and picked 100 at random, how many do you think would be "crap"? 1 or 2 maybe?
And then define "popular". I pretty much know such a site would get a lot of traffic. I know this because I used to run such a site. I stopped working on it because it was difficult to maintain. But if a couple hundred thousand biographies suddenly drop out of google, getting traffic using those biographies would be child's play.
Finally, estimate how quickly you think Wikipedians can approve 100,000 articles.
But really, even if it was, it wouldn't be Wikipedia publishing crappy unsourced libel. It would be some random internet person publishing information deemed by Wikipedia to be too unreliable to have on the main part of its site. That would probably play better in the media.
My comment wasn't meant as a threat. If the Wikimedia foundation decides it'd like to get out of the content distribution business when it comes to unapproved biographies of living people, that's fine with me (*). I was merely pointing out what will be one of the unintended consequences of doing so.
Anthony
(*) In fact, I think the Wikimedia foundation should get out of the content distribution business altogether. Let the mirrors distribute *all* of the content, and let the foundation focus on building the content. But as the very mission statement of the foundation states otherwise, it's not a point I actively argue for.