[WikiEN-l] Re: Wikipedia in the news

[Charles Matthews]

Sheldon Rampton wrote

>. All I'm saying is that
> Wikipedia hasn't yet figured out how to match Encyclopedia Britannica
> with respect to the quality of its articles.

This might be quite true.  Or one could look at it another way.  The concern
about 'minimum standard for inclusion in WP' is quite natural; but in a
sense there is no real minimum standard.  Well, some small proportion of the
dross is deleted every day at VfD; rather more is strangled at birth in
quick deletion; but we really operate a presumption in favour of inclusion
(e.g., in the past few minutes, a Gundam article on a particular armour
suit - don't tell me this is Britannicable).

Basically there is not much of a cut-off at the lower end.  We could remedy
this with (my pet scheme) editable page ratings, of which only the
featured-article and deletion settings would not be accessible to everyone.
The point is that we could easily implement some way of keeping stubs and so
on out of RandomPage, or other kinds of filtering, if there really seemed to
be a need.  Considering the low level of what is printed in newspapers
(which are not free), not to speak of the Web as a whole, there doesn't seem
to be much pressure yet for implementing any serious division of articles.

Charles