----- Original Message -----
From: Risker <risker.wp(a)gmail.com>
Date: Friday, March 21, 2008 3:40 pm
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Deletions snapped up by commercial organizations
policies. Of course, MWB isn't the only
"commercial"
organization that's been on the receiving end of our deleted articles - huge swaths
of material have been resituated to Wikia, for example. I seem to
recall that plenty of articles related to webcomics and television programs have made
this
transition. It helps to keep the articles under more watchful
eyes, while at the same time reducing the risk of copyright violation or
original research.
On the other hand, perhaps we could have had those watchful eyes over here on Wikipedia
working on improving _our_ articles, had we not driven them away.
One of the keys to success of a wiki is to have a critical mass of editors. The more
editors, the better. IMO having two separate wikis with two separate groups of editors is
likely to reduce the quality of both of them compared to one combined wiki, since the
areas of interest of the editors will overlap at least somewhat.
Maybe now we need to change focus a bit and start
encouraging and
rewarding people for being article-watchers. I'd gladly put several hundred
articles onto my watchlist for that purpose, if I could figure out which ones
weren't being watched.
A couple of months ago I stopped paying attention to my watchlist entirely. I'm still
a very active editor, but I spend my time wandering around working on random articles and
on template and category cleanup. I think deletionism may be the root cause; I've
grown tired of going through the emotional wringer whenever I see an article that I'm
interested in or that I've spent a lot of effort working on get marked for deletion or
redirected to a scrawny list entry somewhere.
I'm not at the point of writing a drama-filled "I quit" message or even
going on wikivacation over it, but perhaps this is indicative of one of the sorts of
problems I feel Wikipedia as a metaphorical entity is developing. It's not as
appreciative of contributions any more.