On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 3:10 PM, Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com>
wrote:
David Goodman wrote:
The deletion of improvable articles
because the small number of participants at AfD who are interested
and willing to rescue them is one of the reasons for people losing the
interest in Wikipedia.
Counterfactually, suppose you had a team of "universal" researchers
you
could assign to work on articles. What relative weight would you give to
various types of work? Out of these, (a) filling in popular redlinks,
(b) working over topic lists from other reference works, (c)
fact-checking and referencing long-standing articles on the site that
really are not shaping up, (d) researching for articles where the
initial submission was clearly under-researched, which seem to you most
important factors in developing the site as a whole? Which, for example,
are going to do most to cure systemic bias? Which are going to help our
reputation in the academic world? Which are going to do most for general
reliability? And which (your point) could have the most impact on the
community?
I kind of feel most thoughtful people long-term on the site have voted
with their feet on these issues. It would be surprising, of course, if
self-assignment of tasks also corresponded to any particular person's
view of the correct allocation of priorities. (Only one of the 20 items
culled from AfD has any historical content, the foolish [[shield-mate]],
only one takes us outside the Anglosphere to the 90% of the world's
population who don't think in English, and so on. You may well be right
that something could be salvaged in some cases by good research. Which
is why I'd like to see the "cost" of diverting people onto such work as
part of the assessment.)
Charles
I realize it isn't one of your options, but if I really had such a crack team? I'd
dispatch them to AfD. A crack team can only do so much, and is limited. But if each member
can be responsible for making an editor's experience better, for being the cause of an
editor staying and not leaving in a huff because some people unfamiliar with his pet
subject didn't like the few sources he had thrown together, then that's a big
multiplier.
AfD is exactly the area where a crack researcher can zoom over, see what 'looks'
valid yet not very good, and drop some 5000lb bombs of references and citations down onto
the delete votes.
All the other areas are ones where effort would be repaid with no multipliers. In a way,
if an article hasn't been created on an old topic yet (your red links, your topic
lists), then that alone shows it isn't important. Likewise, if a longstanding article
needs work, then doesn't its longstandingness show that it isn't apparently all
*that* awful because someone would've fixed it up if it was so bad and they cared
about it? Worse is Better. Nobody will think better of Wikipedia if some old article gets
a dozen references and some tags removed. But the editors of an article *will* remember it
if an angel swooped in and saved their article and laid the groundwork for improvements.
--
gwern