Most established users and administrators focus on clearing backlogs, dealing with vandalism, etc.
We need more dedicated article writers. I'm trying to be one.
2007/4/28, Mark Clements gmane@kennel17.co.uk:
"Thomas Dalton" thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote in message news:a4359dff0704271734h1dbf5e98lf5fc65da1978b313@mail.gmail.com...
But I do think we should discuss it... is it better to have 1000 stubs or 100 long well-written articles?
I think the key point here is when you want the encyclopedia to be good. If you want it to be good now, then 100 long articles is best. If you want it to be good in a couple of years, then 1000 stubs (assuming they are good stubs, but that's another debate) is better.
This is based on the assumption than stubs will eventually become articles (and faster than non-existent pages do). This would suggest that younger wikis will have more stubs.
Any guesses on what happens to wikis at the 20,000 edits mark? It's an amazingly sharp cutoff.
I am primarily a reader/editor of en.wp, and if I enter a topic into the search and there is no article for it I tend to assume that either (a) the article exists under some other name, (b) the important information relating to the topic is already covered in some other related article or (c) the topic failed one of en.WPs exhaustive criteria for inlclusion and so is not welcome.
Therefore I do nothing.
In the 'good old days' I would (time permitting) write a stub for that topic. However, nowadays I tend to assume that my contribution would not be welcome (either because the topic is already covered, or because it deliberately does not have an article).
The point being that I would expect stub article creation to be pretty high in new Wikipedias, and to tail off as the Wikipedia in question comes to be seen as more authoritative.
--
Mark Clements (HappyDog)
Mark Clements (HappyDog)
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l