On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 2:13 PM, Apoc 2400 <apoc2400(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I personally think we are at the stage where we should be spending time
improving what we have, rather than creating more work. We aren't low on
articles.
--Majorly
I find this view strange, and if it is a common opinion among experienced
Wikipedians, then that makes me very worried about the state of the
community.
First about the idea of "creating work": If our goal is to write a
comprehensive encyclopedia, then the work of writing those articles was
always there. Creating stubs just makes it visible.
Second, Wikipedia is nowhere near finished in terms of number of articles.
Take a look at this image and tell me if geographical locations are well
covered throughout the world:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Imageworld-artphp3.png
There is also a huge number of historical people with no articles. Whole
academic subjects such as philosophy are barely covered and not very well
written. Events before 2001 that aren't frequently referenced today is not
nearly as well covered as recent events.
Sure, the subjects the average Wikipedia writer is likely to look up are
well covered. My favorite subject areas were actually quite well covered
already in 2004. There is an article on pretty much every American town,
film, band, athlete etc, but as soon as you go outside North America,
Europe, Japan and Australia it gets a lot more sparse.
I cannot find the link right now, but I have seen estimates that the total
number of notable subjects is at least 10 million, probably closer to 100
million.
Now if this was just your personal opinion it wouldn't be a problem, but
the
meme that Wikipedia has enough articles affects processes and community
standards. When I complain that it has become too difficult for a newbie to
create a new article, I am met with replies along the lines of "It helps
keep the crap out, and we don't need more articles anyway". If people who
start new articles are considered as troublemakers, then all those millions
of missing topics will never be covered.
Your jump from my opinion that we should spend more time improving what we
have, to labelling people who create articles as "troublemakers" is a fairly
big one. I never once implied such a thing in my two sentences. I create
articles occasionally, so it would be hypocritical of me to hold such a
view.
I believe it is *more* important (read, not replacing) to improve articles
we have, rather than creating more to maintain. I haven't said we should ban
new articles, or dissuade people from creating them. I'm saying we should
encourage them to improve what we have. There's nothing wrong with that.
It's how I started out, improving what we have already, before I went on to
create my first article.
--Majorly