On Wed, 25 Aug 2004 20:43:31 +0100, Pete/Pcb21 pete_pcb21_wpmail@pcbartlett.com wrote:

How does having articles of borderline interest make it unusable? If I type "George Washington" into Google and end up at the excellent Wikipedia article of the same name, Wikipedia has proved very usuable. It is completely irrelevant whether a borderline article such as "George from Rainbow" is also available *for those who search for it*

In some sense I agree, but what has bothered me lately is the fact that Googling for "wikipedia foo" likely brings up one of our mirrors first, and not Wikipedia itself. So when I see a blatant error magnified "n" times on the many mirrors on the Internet, it sends a chill up my spine.

Worse, because those sites are mirrors, and don't accept changes, it makes it easy for readers to walk off and say, "What a crackpot project."

So increasingly, the dynamic is changing, and in large part it's due to Google search results. Whether these mirrors are gaming the search algorithm or whatever, increasingly "Wikipedia content" does not reside in a true wiki, because the fruits of publishing are being removed from the mechanisms of fixing errors. I feel the dynamic of inclusionism/deletionism and the promptness of when things are fixed must take this into account.