On 1/5/06, Peter Mackay peter.mackay@bigpond.com wrote:
From: wikien-l-bounces@Wikipedia.org [mailto:wikien-l-bounces@Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of Tony Sidaway
This is an encyclopedia, not a dating service.
It seems to me that Wikipedia is very good as an encyclopaedia compared with everything else on the web, and very poor as a dating service, blog site, chess-playing site etc when compared to other sites. Do people really come here for these secondary reasons when there are other, better places available?
One pretty good way to find out would be to take away the user categories and see how many people leave. If they mostly stay, we've gotten rid of things that facilitate the abuse of Wikipedia. If they mostly leave, we've unshipped people who were here for the wrong reasons. Either way is a win.