[Foundation-l] [EWW] Edit Wikipedia Week

[Christiano Moreschi]

" Both tracks are equally important: quality _and_
 participation. And one, ultimately, depends on the other."

I have to chuckle here - this is simply not the case. Check out the revision history of [[Herodotus]]. It's been edited continuously for yonks, mostly by IPs adding drips and drabs here and there. The result is a pile of lies on one of our most core articles - Herodotus is the Father of History, FFS! I remember checking out the article's June 2006 version. It still contained plenty of lies, but actually far less. Participation has killed off quality, and has done so for thousands of other articles. You look at the 5000 lonely articles that might be OK among the swathe of 2 million fairly crappy ones. 90 percent of those will have been written by one Sherlock Holmes, who will probably have a couple of faithful Doctor Watsons copy-editing for him and doing general clean-up. Sooo...all our best articles are produced exactly how they would be at a normal encyclopaedia. Don't we find this suggestive?

Ergo, the fewer people editing an article, the better it is (BTW, this explains why so many FAs are on weird, random, highly obscure articles, when half the really vital articles are for shit). And then - excuse me - we ask more people, randomly picked off the street/Starbucks, to walk in the front door and piss up the curtains. We don't need more editors - we need a lot fewer, carefully picked on grounds of knowledge, sanity, IQ, and credentials. A growing community, the last thing we want, is going to create more articles - also the last thing we want. You wouldn't consider slapping an arbitrary article cap on enwiki, would you? Say one of 2.5 million allowed, but no further? Maybe if I asked nicely?

CM

P.S. You'll forgive me for not really buying into the stable versions stuff - haven't we heard it all before? I'll believe it when I see it, really.
PP.S. Nerdy white young men? Ah, those beautiful children of the Enlightenment! How well, and with such sweet reason, do they understand NPOV! More, please!
PPP.S. Ooh, the fundraiser. Next time we do this, couldn't you hire someone professional to do the banners? We'd all shout a lot less if you did.

Odi profanum vulgus et arceo.

> Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2007 22:51:29 +0100
> From: erik at wikimedia.org
> To: foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] [EWW] Edit Wikipedia Week
> 
> On 11/20/07, Christiano Moreschi <moreschiwikiman at hotmail.co.uk> wrote:
> >
> > This vulgar monstrosity got my blood boiling. Who the hell thought this one up?
> > Clearly, not someone who spends half their day fighting in the dirty,
> > blood-bespattered trenches of the never-ending Wikipedia-wars.
> 
> I always appreciate a good rant. :-) But I disagree with you. The
> point of broadening participation is exactly to increase quality and
> to reduce systemic bias of content authored by a predominantly white,
> young, male, nerdy community.
> 
> That said -- of course any growth of our community needs to be
> managed. And while the stable versions project may look like it's
> frozen, it's not: the demo site linked from quality.wikimedia.org has
> resulted in a lot of feedback, additional work has gone into vetting
> the extension for security and scalability issues, and only the
> necessary work on fundraiser-related tech issues is pushing the date
> for deployment and further testing a bit.
> 
> With two full-time developers, any strategic high priority project is
> difficult to execute. That's part of the reason we need to grow the
> organization, and we need all the help we can get in developing
> fundraising and revenue strategies that will allow us to do so. (That
> said, if you are an open source developer, nothing is stopping you
> from contributing to the code directly -- I will gladly point you to
> the right places to do so.)
> 
> IMO the natural evolution of Wikipedia will be such that there will be
> a growing separation between "collaboration spaces" and "reading
> spaces" -- both require different social norms and different
> technologies. We won't abandon the principle of massive global
> collaboration to increase the usefulness of our content: that would be
> insane. Both tracks are equally important: quality _and_
> participation. And one, ultimately, depends on the other.
> 
> -- 
> Toward Peace, Love & Progress:
> Erik
> 
> DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of
> the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.
> 
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

_________________________________________________________________
The next generation of MSN Hotmail has arrived - Windows Live Hotmail
http://www.newhotmail.co.uk