On Sun, Jun 16, 2019 at 8:18 AM Mister Thrapostibongles < thrapostibongles@gmail.com> wrote:
Let's look at the content first. Even on Wikipedia's own terms, it has failed. It is a principle that Wikipedia is founded on reliable sources, and by its own admission, Wikipedia itself is not such a source. That bears repetition -- a project aiming to be an encyclopaedia, that compares itself with Britannica, explicitly is not reliable. Foundation research has shown that about one fifth of Wikipedia articles are supported by references that are inadequate to support the text or simply are not there. That's about a million articles each on of the larger Wikpedias. Some thousands of those are biographies of living people and in view of the risk of defamation, no such articles should exist on Wikipedia at all. There are several thousand articles that are possible copyright violations: again such articles should not be there. And when I say "should not", I mean according to the rules adopted by the Wikipedia volunteer community itself.
The WMF has multiple, conflicting goals, just like the community. I don't think you should take it as a given that the WMF will take a position that aligns perfectly with what you want. In terms of unverified articles, consider ACTRIAL.[1] The community approved it in in 2011, but the WMF vetoed it for 6 years. Eventually, the trial was allowed to proceed; most of the feared negative effects did not materialize, and the WMF made the change permanent in response to overwhelming community support for it.
The community has been working on copyright violation issues for a long time.[2] There are probably ways the WMF could support improvements in this area. Maybe the WMF could even design some system that would magically solve the problem. But it's certainly not the community standing in the way.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Autoconfirmed_article_creation_trial [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyright_violations#Resources Also consider https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2013-November/128777.html back in 2013.