On 8/22/06, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
New articles are still important, as you've pointed out... But I've seen no evidence that new article creation belongs even on the top 100 task list for making our encyclopedia not suck.
I'd certainly put it in the top 100, even the top 10, although probably not the top 3. When a user looks up an article, the worst possible result would be to find a misleading or otherwise incorrect article.
Why's that so bad? They can just edit it to fix it.
The second-worst result would be to find no article.
Why's that so bad? They can just create it.
Oh wait, they can't. So that IS bad.
The third-worst would be to find a somewhat shoddy but not misleading or wrong article.
Again, fixable. I'd think the obviously wrong article might be more likely to motivate someone to fix it so maybe shoddy is a bad thing.
So I'd rank "we don't cover that at all" pretty high on the list of ways our coverage of a topic could suck.
I know I'm still frequently annoyed that I have to look elsewhere for information in seemingly basic subjects because we don't yet cover them. For example, there are 20+ former prime ministers of Greece on which we have no article, and thousands of basic computer science topics.