geni wrote:
On 10/15/06, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
So (as ever) some care is needed here; anyone who got the idea that "any fact left uncited for 7 days may/must be removed" would be setting themselves or the encyclopedia up for a fall.
We don't have the manpower.
But that's not even the point. If the notion got entrenched that *any* fact-tagged statement left unattended for more than a week could be summarily deleted, I do dare to speculate that it would lead to abuses, completely apart from the question of whether every fact-tagged statement would receive proper attention.
Besides which, I don't think it's too meaningful to say that we "don't have the manpower". We have *vast* quantities of manpower, more than we sometimes know what to do with. We've currently got, on average, something like 130 edits being made each minute, day in, day out. That's almost 200,000 edits per day, and over 2 per second. Now, it's true, many of those are to talk pages, and the rest are spread out over more than a million articles, and some fraction of those are drive-by vandalism, but still.
Wikipedia wouldn't exist in its current form if it didn't have near-infinite manpower available to it. Many aspects of Wikipedia are clearly impossible due to "lack of manpower", yet seem to work just fine anyway. In fact, Wikipedia is one of my two examples (along with, um, Microsoft) of the successful application of the Mongolian Hordes technique. (Oddly enough we still don't have an article on this technique, but the Jargon File does.)