--- Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote:
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.
Smaller language versions of Wikipedia need to emphasize growth over quality, true. But
larger
language version (not projects! Wikipedia itself is a project) do not and would be
greatly
improved by requiring sources.
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.
And yet many millions of people are using the larger language versions of Wikipedia as
reference
sources RIGHT NOW. We have a responsibility to do what we can to increase the chances of
actually
serving them accurate content. Creating a culture of sourcing material to good references
in the
larger language versions of Wikipedia will help a great deal in that regard.
-- mav
__________________________________________
Yahoo! DSL Something to write home about.
Just $16.99/mo. or less.
dsl.yahoo.com