[Foundation-l] 10 thoughts on how to improve the quality of Swedish Wikipedia‏

[David Gerard]

On 12/03/2008, Lennart Guldbrandsson <wikihannibal at gmail.com> wrote:

>  ===Thought number one: delete the bad articles===
>  I want to begin with a controversial proposal. It was controversial on dewp
>  and the result there is still not totally clear, but I think that it may be
>  good to start with a jolt.
>  The proposal is to '''remove all bad articles'''. Bad articles come in many
>  forms: stubs and substubs, articles with low real content (e.g. peacock and
>  weasel terms), articles without proper language, articles that are
>  confusing, lists that can never be completed, etc, etc. By deleting them we
>  won't have a [[:Category:Wikipedia maintenance|maintenance page]] that's
>  always full of things to do and has become a constant guilty conscience,
>  rather than a project which some time will be more or less fulfilled.
>  How would this be done? Well, the active users in a particular topic, for
>  example a [[:Wikipedia:WikiProject|project]] or a
>  [[:Wikipedia:Portal|portal]] (in other words: people who are interested),
>  regularly go through "their" categories and weed out the worst articles -
>  ''of course, they should enhance the articles they can". Enhancements are
>  naturally better, but in many instances it would take such a long time that
>  it's better to simply remove the articles.
>  '''Summary:''' This deletion proposal would lead to svwp downsizing the
>  article count. We could even go below 250,000 articles. But think of it like
>  this: what kind of press release we could issue! "Wikipedia takes out all
>  garbage."


This approach has already led to severe public relations problems for
en:wp, including a writeup in The Economist.

It also implies the live, working wiki is a finished polished product,
which kills working on it. en:wp has 2 million articles, but there's
at least 20 million topics that would be covered but aren't yet if you
just include all towns and state-level politicians.


- d.