On 6/13/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
Exactly how is the community working to solve the problem of new articles being created which are never reviewed by anyone involved with the project?
Most of the solutions require developer support. Mediawiki development is rather hierarchical compared to the rest of Wikipedia, and there's not a whole lot that most of the community *can* do.
I suppose community members could spend lots of time writing patches to the Mediawiki code and take a chance that their patches will be ignored like some of the ones that came before them. But that's asking a whole lot of people.
Even things as simple as garbage being added to articles could be improved right away. For example, Article gets moved to Article/development. A copy is made back to article, a template added, page protected. Sitewide JS hacks fix up edit links for most browsers. Done. It's not perfect... but if successful mediawiki could be easily enhanced to support the model. We've been arguing and blowing hot air for at least a *year* on how to solve that problem, yet we've taken nearly no action. No one has come up with a perfect system, or at least if someone has no one has implemented it yet. It's probably no possible to come up with a solution the the community can agree is good because our deadlock prevents us from building the experience needed to build a good solution or even evaluate the qualities of a proposal... In some cases the community is simply terrible at decision making, someone long winded noncontributing naysayer able to come in and disrupt progress.
Ultimately it's up to the people who run the servers to decide what solution they want. Again, I don't see how more than a handful of members of the community can help with making this decision.
Anthony