On Sat, Jun 4, 2016 at 12:16 PM, John Erling Blad jeblad@gmail.com wrote:
An aditional note.
The problem is that a community can handle a quite specific workload. Some of that goes into producing new articles, some goes into patrolling. Some goes into maintenance of existing articles. When a project has to much dynamic content (and it will always have some dynamic content) they start to move into a maintenance mode, because they are swamped by the dynamic content.
A typical indication that something is going on is that the patrol log starts to overflow. Another is that the production of new articles starts to drop, but that will drop anyhow because of addition of new content to old articles.[1] To get good numbers we need the factor "new content"/"edited old content". When that number start to drop then we know that the community starts to run into problems.
Agreed.
If we had unlimited sources, then we could add more workload, but we don't have unlimited sources (aka manhours). The community is limited. Adding new work to the existing will thus not scale very well, if at all. We need ways to cope with the existing workload, not additional work.
In short; nice thesis, but even if it can be _implemented_ it will not scale on Wikipedia.
And of course, someone will surly claim that we could just just get some more members in the community. Yes, sure, some of us has been working on that for several years.[2]
I think you are misreading some of the text. One of the core ideas of Wikidata is to share workload across Wikipedias. The concept Charlie worked on is a step to help more with that.
Cheers Lydia