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.
Apoc 2400 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.
Reading it as "spending [some] time improving what we have, rather than [just] creating more work [in terms of contributions that are at the lowest standard acceptable on the site]" it must be a not uncommon view. Reading as " [exclusively] spending time improving what we have, rather than creating more work [by filling in gaps]" it becomes a more extreme statement of upgrading rather than finishing the encyclopedia; which may be closer to the intended comment on worrying or not about redlink lists.
Charles
I usually suggest to new-comers that they first spend some time improving and updating articles in their field of interest to get familiar with both editing mechanics and wikipedia culture. After that, they are ready to write new articles. the two are compatible; some users will always be interested more in one than the other.
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 9:23 AM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
Apoc 2400 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.
Reading it as "spending [some] time improving what we have, rather than [just] creating more work [in terms of contributions that are at the lowest standard acceptable on the site]" it must be a not uncommon view. Reading as " [exclusively] spending time improving what we have, rather than creating more work [by filling in gaps]" it becomes a more extreme statement of upgrading rather than finishing the encyclopedia; which may be closer to the intended comment on worrying or not about redlink lists.
Charles
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On Mon, Dec 7, 2009 at 2:39 PM, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
I usually suggest to new-comers that they first spend some time improving and updating articles in their field of interest to get
It depends what you mean by "newcomer". I think it's easy to make the mistake of assuming a single entry point: "There is some guy, and he has a burning desire to write an article for Wikipedia, and will jump through as many hurdles as necessary to make it happen". Whereas there are all sorts of ways people get involved, like following a surprising redlink, or talking to a friend, or reading about it, or whatever.
The challenge is to get as much value out of each potential "newcomer" as possible: if someone has the inclination to write three articles before losing interest, we want them to write three articles. If someone could be a massive Wikipedia nerd if only someone would show them ropes, then...you get the idea.
Steve
On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 2:13 PM, Apoc 2400 apoc2400@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
On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 9:13 AM, Apoc 2400 apoc2400@gmail.com wrote:
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
While I fully agree with your "nowhere near finished" position, the argument you presented here is especially weak.
All that shows is that the geodata coverage is not especially uniform.
Geocoding is clearly more popular in locations with lots of technology which make geocoding easy. In particular some parts have high apparent geocoding coverage because the articles were mass created from external public-domain databases which contained geodata.
Wikipedia could have rather comprehensive worldwide coverage and still give you that kind of graph.
It's also the case that being nowhere near complete is not mutually exclusive with prioritizing spending more time on improving existing articles. For example, you could hold the position that the existing articles are on more popular topics and Wikipedia would be more valuable with those articles being higher quality rather than having broader coverage; or you could hold the position that new articles will turn out to be very low quality if the rest of the project is not improved, since people do emulate the behaviour in existing articles.
On Mon, Dec 7, 2009 at 3:02 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
While I fully agree with your "nowhere near finished" position, the argument you presented here is especially weak.
All that shows is that the geodata coverage is not especially uniform.
Yeah, that map has been popping up everywhere, usually with seriously over-reaching interpretations. The Burkina Faso/South Africa comparison is worth bearing in mind.
Steve