"The Cunctator" wrote
I soundly disagree with you that's the main conclusion from this discussion.
I'm open to other conclusions.
In fact, looking at your above summary, I might think the proper conclusion to draw is that the bureaucratic overhead of contributing to Wikipedia has grown out of control.
It probably is harder to be a newbie. But you can still turn up and edit 99.9% of the articles without having an account. It is not plausible to me that there is a solution to compiling the largest repository (of its kind) of human knowledge ever, without some sort of trade-off. 'Open for business' is still hanging there on the door.
Charles
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On 4/2/07, charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
"The Cunctator" wrote
I soundly disagree with you that's the main conclusion from this discussion.
I'm open to other conclusions.
In fact, looking at your above summary, I might think the proper conclusion to draw is that the bureaucratic overhead of contributing to Wikipedia has grown out of control.
It probably is harder to be a newbie. But you can still turn up and edit 99.9% of the articles without having an account. It is not plausible to me that there is a solution to compiling the largest repository (of its kind) of human knowledge ever, without some sort of trade-off. 'Open for business' is still hanging there on the door.
I think a powerful fallacy in your line of reasoning is the assumption that the encyclopedia in its current state is anywhere near the point of being comprehensive.
We should be expending every effort to prevent Wikipedia from being less welcoming or harder for newbies. Signs that Wikipedia is becoming less welcoming for newbies indicate the primary points of decay in the system.
On 4/2/07, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/2/07, charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
"The Cunctator" wrote
I soundly disagree with you that's the main conclusion from this
discussion.
I'm open to other conclusions.
In fact, looking at your above summary, I might think the proper conclusion to draw is that the bureaucratic overhead of contributing to Wikipedia has grown out of control.
It probably is harder to be a newbie. But you can still turn up and edit
99.9% of the articles without having an account. It is not plausible to me that there is a solution to compiling the largest repository (of its kind) of human knowledge ever, without some sort of trade-off. 'Open for business' is still hanging there on the door.
I think a powerful fallacy in your line of reasoning is the assumption that the encyclopedia in its current state is anywhere near the point of being comprehensive.
We should be expending every effort to prevent Wikipedia from being less welcoming or harder for newbies. Signs that Wikipedia is becoming less welcoming for newbies indicate the primary points of decay in the system.
You're right, Wikipedia certainly isn't comprehensive. However, this is only a temporary solution, and as soon as it's over, people can start adding more articles again (indeed, we'd probably even have a system for people to do this during the moratorium). This doesn't make it worse for newbies, because by closing new article creation now, we can finally clear the massive cleanup backlogs, and so we can start dealing with new articles right away, making Wikipedia more reliable, giving it a better reputation and therefore attracting more new users. In addition, perhaps if we didn't have to focus on fixing year-old problems, we could open up article creation to everyone, including anons, making us even more welcoming to new users than before, but still not compromising our integrity, because we'd have the manpower to actually fix any new articles with problems.
Rory Stolzenberg wrote:
You're right, Wikipedia certainly isn't comprehensive. However, this is only a temporary solution, and as soon as it's over, people can start adding more articles again (indeed, we'd probably even have a system for people to do this during the moratorium). This doesn't make it worse for newbies, because by closing new article creation now, we can finally clear the massive cleanup backlogs, and so we can start dealing with new articles right away, making Wikipedia more reliable, giving it a better reputation and therefore attracting more new users.
Now that most backlogs are categorized by date it should be possible to get some rough information about how quickly things in them get addressed. Personally, I suspect that three months wouldn't be long enough to flush all our backlogs. Especially considering that disabling article creation isn't going to stop things from continuing to be added to them. I find old articles in need of cleanup, merging, fact-checking, etc all the time in my travels.
In addition, perhaps if we didn't have to focus on fixing year-old problems, we could open up article creation to everyone, including anons, making us even more welcoming to new users than before, but still not compromising our integrity, because we'd have the manpower to actually fix any new articles with problems.
The reason anon article creation is disabled is not because anons were creating articles with problems, it's because an anon user added a false statement to an article that had been created by a logged-in editor. No evidence was ever presented (that I'm aware of) suggesting that anon-created articles are more of a problem than non-anon-created ones.