Robth wrote
Taking a lassez faire approach to article quality
(and
specifically, reference quality) will ensure that our average article
remains rather poorly referenced, and strikes me as a sure way to at
best delay the development of a higher quality encyclopedia, and at
worst lastingly sidetrack the project.
You have a point. However the 'average article' is a somewhat problematic concept.
For several reasons, in fact. One could weight any 'average' (mean) according to
the word count of articles: so that large, well-referenced articles count for more than
stubby ones. Following up that idea, one could realise that we do hypertext, not
individual articles, and an unreferenced stub created to fill in a red link is still more
to go on than the red link qua title. (It is a node, can gather up redirectsm, and so on.)
What is more, under a hypothetical feature that hid stubs from people who didn't want
them, it might all look rather better on a random sample.
In other words, the status quo says 'please judge us as a hypertext work in
progress'. Adding references is in many cases (not all) a type of clean-up; we have
always had clean-up to do.
Charles
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