Hoi, "the quality of our contributions should be excellent" and "not only experts should contribute". Your entry level is high. It is too high because you insist on contributions to be unchallengeable. You wish for us to be better than others, individually we are not. When we collaborate we may be better than most. In order to have great content, we first have to acquire it then some will check it, discuss it and improve it. It may be annotated with sources we can sprinkle our magic on it BUT it is an argument that we have had before..

Let me go over the same argument again: our content grows in quality and quantity. When you look at it, the percentage of stubs is still more or less the same but there are more of them. The percentage of stellar articles stays the same and there are more of them. Some of our projects have grown to the point where quoting sources is a done thing. A percentage of articles provide their sources this percentage may be growing but at some point it will stay the same.

Now here is the rub, when you insist that all our articles need to provide sources, you will lose our stubs. You will make the composition of the content different. When you only consider only the English or the German language wikipedia you may be of the opinion that it has enough content. For projects that are in its infancy like the Swahili Wikipedia it would be a killer. It would be a killer because we do not have the vibrant community that we wish for it.

Danny, indeed you are not saying that only experts should contribute but you do insist that contributions should be excellent. Indeed we are not a dumping ground nor are we a bulletin board and our history proves that we are not. Now you cannot have it both ways. Either you accept that we do our best and quoting sources is only an aspect of it or you insist on perfection all round. So far we have never been perfect but we have been striving for perfection. To me it sounds that Wikipedia is the product of humans and fallible as a consequence. I think this is only to be expected.

It is indeed great to strive to be better than other encyclopaedias. There biggest achievement is in the relevancy that they had in the past. Encyclopaedias were the embodiment of knowledge. Many people grew up with them and acquired knowledge that way. Wikipedia is young and its relevancy is something that can only be judged in the future. My opinion is that the projects where we are best at present may not be the ones where we will be most relevant. When we are able to develop Wikipedias in languages like Kannada, Telugu or Bambara we will develop a resource that may become comparable in relevancy to the encyclopaedias that we want to improve upon.

Thanks, GerardM

daniwo59@aol.com wrote:

Gerard,

No one is saying that only experts should contribute. We are saying that the quality of our contributions should be excellent. They should be unchallengable. They should be of the highest possible quality. They should be better than other encyclopedias. After all, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a bulletin board or dumping ground. As a collaborative effort, we can achieve that. X can add a fact, Y can provide a source, If there are a lot of sources, we can even create separate source pages, and even have articles about those sources, as has been suggested. The sky is the limit. But under no circumstances should we compromise on our quality.

Danny

In a message dated 12/3/2005 7:46:13 AM Eastern Standard Time, gerard.meijssen@gmail.com writes:

Being expert is not necessarily a bad thing. It is a bad thing when it makes you think that you

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