charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
Robth wrote
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.
Well, you'll notice that the _unselective_ wish o have everything sourced to the hilt is aggravating this.
Exactly. Being guided by obsessive-compulsive neat-freaks too easily can cloud our long-term vision.
We have always had the 'piles'.
And they are a pain in the ass. ;-)
The question is more like: are the quality initiatives proposed fit for purpose?
In a normal growth environment the number of sub-standard articles is bound to grow too. If this is in proportion to other growth looking at just the absolute number of these in isolation the problem can often seem worse than it actually is. On any given article one needs to expect that it will itself grow over a continuum from stub to fully documented article, but that takes time.
Labelling with [[Category:Living persons]] is good, because it addresses a serious issue. Fretting about the quality of pop-culture articles is fairly pointless, on that scale. Deleting dodgy images is good (my take - I'm a text person first and foremost); it is quite true that images are worth at least 1000 words, but getting the text straight is the foundation. 100K 'featured articles' - did nothing for me. Getting a page up per surname, i.e. at least 10000 dab pages of the kind most people pay no attention to: very useful, because it inherently opens up the navigation and checking.
I tend to be text bound too, and pay minimal attention to images. If something makes it to "featured article" that's fine, but I'm not going to be worried about it getting there. At one per day it will take the better part of 3000 years to put up 100K.
And so on. Just let's acknowledge that quality beefs should be prioritised.
Absolutely. This put higher priority on things that are potentially illegal or which represent a questionable POV. Even there a POV about current events is more condequential than one about a video game.
Ec