On 12/9/05, Keith Old keithold@gmail.com wrote:
Further to MGM's point, as we get more popular, more attention will be paid to us and we cannot afford to carry thousands of bad articles if we can avoid it.
We already do; after the speedies have done their pass, AfD only scratches the surface of crappy material, and human judgement being so variable, a lot of potentially good material also has to run the gauntlet. The only way to avoid the appearance of unencyclopedic articles on Wikipedia and their persistence on Wikipedia is to disable article creation. Or we can admit the obvious: that Wikipedia is a work in progress.
But your point about Google suggests a strategy for patrolling. There are lists of popular Google searches. Pop the top 100 of those into a database, renewed daily, and scan google results for Wikipedia pages. Dump the output as Wikipedia links in Wikipedia space somewhere as a hit list, and anyone who feels like checking them can do so and take any appropriate action. Feed back acceptable articles (not necessarily good, as they may need cleanup) into the database so that these can be pruned from the hit list to avoid duplication of work.