On 12/5/06, Robth robth1@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/5/06, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:
Fix fix fix.
Instead of complain complain complain delete delete delete.
But hey. We're getting near the 7-year life cycle of most such innovative projects, so I'm expecting the major successful fork pretty soon.
The problem is this: the volume of contributions to Wikipedia by one-time or occasional contributors who "pass-by", as it were, and add something, is far too great for the community of steady maintenance-oriented contributors to keep up with "fixing" all of it as it comes in. If we're going to place the onus on these steady contributors to fix all this stuff, then we're going to end up with a huge pile of stuff waiting to be "fixed" that is broken in very basic ways; articles with no sources, images without specific enough information, etc. This is the approach we have taken up till now, and huge piles of stuff waiting to be fixed is exactly what we have.
I'm really quite amazed that this "problem" keeps being brought up, because the solution to this seems to me to be so blindingly simple: ignore the huge pile of stuff waiting to be "fixed". Set up tools to simplify this. Reserve deletion for those situations where it is illegal or unethical to continue to distribute the content.
The reason this is a problem is that on Wikipedia you get what you have. One-time or occasional contributors (and, for that matter, many if not most fairly regular contributors) don't go read through a bunch of policies and what-not before they add something, they just add something that looks like it fits in with the rest of the content.
Well yeah, that's kind of the whole point of Wikipedia. So I'm not sure if this is what you're getting at or not, but the question should be "how do we create an encyclopedia when the vast majority of the contributors don't go read through a bunch of policies and what-not before they add something?" Think manual of style. We don't delete "EXTERNAL LINKS" sections, we change them into "External links" sections...
When I started contributing, I didn't list my sources, because the Wikipedia articles I had seen while using the site didn't list theirs. If you have unsourced articles, "in popular culture" sections everywhere, and too many and insufficiently labelled fair use images, people are going to assume that those things are what you want and give you more of them.
A valid point, though it's much easier to stick a message on the top of an article which warns the reader not to create something similar than it is to put it through any of the deletion mechanisms. It's also rather easy to take an "in popular culture" section and move it to its own article. In that case I'd usually favor just deleting it, but I guess I wouldn't object to someone who wanted to keep it - in their own separate articles.
"Fair use" images are a whole 'nother creature, and delinking them from articles is not an act of deletion anyway.
If we are going to improve the net quality of Wikipedia, and maximize the benefit we receive from the contributions of people who want to help and base their judgement of how to do so on the type of content they have observed on the site, then we need to either clone dedicated Wikipedians to start fixing these things night and day or somehow cut off the inflow of stuff that needs fixing.
Depends how you define "net quality". I'd define it as "Articles - bad articles" (aka "good articles"). Either way, reducing the number of bad articles doesn't improve "net quality".
This proposal, with a waiting period intended to encourage the original contributor to add sources before the article is deleted to improve the average quality of our content (and thus the average quality of incoming contributions), strikes me as very well thought out.
Overly thought out, I'd say. I don't have a problem with tight editorial controls. They just don't seem to me to have any place in a project like Wikipedia. If you want tight editorial controls go work on Citizendium, not Wikipedia. And I don't mean that in a derogatory way - I think both projects have their good points and their bad points.
Anthony