David Gerard wrote:
The problem is that we peaked way too early. The site is late-alpha or early beta at best, and should have big 1995-style yellow and black "UNDER CONSTRUCTION" GIFs with really bad aliasing on most pages.
The even more basic problem is everybody and their dog laments about article quality, yet nobody is bold enough to tell the world that we have already way too much garbage and can't even tell what is garbage and what is not. It has long been obvious to the insiders, and I am actually amazed that the rest of the world is only now beginning to realize it. Wikipedians need to realize that no amount of mediocre-to-shitty articles can compensate for a lack of quality content. A helpful approach would be to stop accepting new articles, take our content, scrutinise it and rewrite it from zero. Rewrite the encyclopedia and let the warriors/nutters/clueless kids have their fun, but not on our servers. Ah, the charm of radical solutions.
Kosebamse
kosebamse@gmx.net wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
The problem is that we peaked way too early. The site is late-alpha or early beta at best, and should have big 1995-style yellow and black "UNDER CONSTRUCTION" GIFs with really bad aliasing on most pages.
The even more basic problem is everybody and their dog laments about article quality, yet nobody is bold enough to tell the world that we have already way too much garbage and can't even tell what is garbage and what is not. It has long been obvious to the insiders, and I am actually amazed that the rest of the world is only now beginning to realize it. Wikipedians need to realize that no amount of mediocre-to-shitty articles can compensate for a lack of quality content. A helpful approach would be to stop accepting new articles, take our content, scrutinise it and rewrite it from zero. Rewrite the encyclopedia and let the warriors/nutters/clueless kids have their fun, but not on our servers. Ah, the charm of radical solutions.
An even more radical, but ultimately rational, approach would be to admit that the Wikipedia experiment is a disastrous failure and shut the site down completely and permanently.
A project with two equally important goals that are utterly incompatible by definition -- why was it launched in the first place? Wouldn't any rational observer have seen a result like this as not only possible but likely, if not inevitable?
The USA Today article makes a case not just for the obliteration of Wikipedia but ultimately for taking down the Internet itself.
On 11/30/05, kosebamse@gmx.net kosebamse@gmx.net wrote:
A helpful approach would be to stop accepting new articles, take our content, scrutinise it and rewrite it from zero.
It's a wiki. Dozens of good quality articles are written from scratch every single day, and ceasing to accept such new articles would not help to get the encyclopedia written.
Meanwhile if you can compile a list of important articles that have not fared well under the wiki (I submit that this could be a fairly brief list, perhaps 1,000 or so) perhaps a team of interested individuals can take those articles off the main wiki and hothouse them for a while--or even, as you suggest, rewrite from scratch. I'd be interested to see if this approach produces significantly better articles.