On 20/11/2007, Christiano Moreschi <moreschiwikiman(a)hotmail.co.uk> wrote:
Absolutely. You're quite right. This is why Wikipedia doesn't work, though.
At least, not really. Not in providing information anyone can trust, so the
bigger bibliographies people include, the better. All we can really hope to
be at the moment is a starting point for people to find lists of reliable
sources.
Even if this were the case (I don't buy that we have 95% actively
detrimental articles, but let's presume we do) there's no indication
that encouraging more contributors will automatically make things
worse.
It's not as though our existing volunteers are abnormally intelligent,
or particularly gifted at writing an encyclopedia; they're just some
people who wound up helping. Why does this indicate the population at
large is going to be worse? We *are* the population at large, we just
want to get a bigger slice of it.
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk