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.
I agree with this fairly strongly---Wikipedia is a work in progress, and not currently intended to be a drop-in replacement for traditional encyclopedias. It is already very useful, but nobody should assume it is done or even at some reasonable checkpoint (we're still, after all, trying to figure out how to set up a checkpointing/rating system).
Anything that would compromise the general principles that have made Wikipedia succeed for the sake of "right now" quality would be disastrous, IMO. Continuing to work on processes to produce levels of vetting for articles (like the sifting or rating features) is of course compatible with this.
-Mark