The core of Wikipedia culture is battleground: fight vandals, nuke their articles, whack them and quick! Yes, it is important for the integrity
of
the encyclopedia. Yes, spam was prophesied to be the end of Wikipedia.
But
what will surely kill it is lack of participation. And we are killing
the
participation by whacking it with deletions, clean ups, bans, etc.
We have to make a profound choice in the culture here:
- we continue with the whacking and scaring the newbies away (content
priority #1, people #2), or 2) we embrace the newbies and we let some spam through (people priority
#1,
content #2).
So far we are steadily moving along the first route. I believe, it is
time
we switch the priorities. People are important. It's the people who will
be
creating content in the future, and not the other way around. Wikipedia will inevitably fail without participation. And content... we are already the largest and the best...
Renata
To me it sounds too much black and white. Indeed, there are points you better not stumble across as an editor: engaging into battles over disputed content (like Middle East conflict), writing articles on smth with disputed notability, pushing POV or not getting immediately the image upload rules. But I assume this is a relatively minor fraction of editors (though of course it still represents a problem). I can not recall that I ever got any templates in my articles (I have written over 500 of them since 2007), except for a couple of times from a bot that there are no links to the article, and that I ever got any angry comments from admins/other editors concerning the articles I have written. The only serious problems I got was when several trolls started to request a source on every word in two of my articles, and this had nothing to do with the quality of the articles, but with me being a sysop. So I believe the problem exists but is grossly exaggerated (though for someone who has to fight for the notability of his/her only article it may very well be the most serious and grave problem).
Cheers Yaroslav