On 12/10/05, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
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.
Moreover, I'd say AFD is a horrible solution for "bad articles". The vast majority of "bad articles" deleted via AFD, which don't already fall under a speedy deletion criterion, could easily be either changed into a redirect or into a good, albeit short, article (usually on an obscure subject).
If you're saying we can't afford to carry good short articles on obscure subjects, well, I disagree there. We can afford to do it, and it doesn't require lowering our standards at all.
One thing we should probably introduce in this area though is that articles which do not provide any references should be speedy deletions. Now there are probably a whole lot of good articles out there right now which would fit that, so for now let's make the CSD criterion only for articles caught in the first 48 hours. And let's require the user who created the article to be informed of the deletion on her talk page.
Of course admins can and should be encouraged to add references instead of just deleting the article. But it's not a requirement. Yes, some potentially good articles might be deleted. But as this only affects new articles right now, it's no worse than turning off new article creation completely. Yes, some people will intentionally troll Wikipedia with obscure sources that can't be easily verified. This doesn't fix that, something else will have to. But it's not a new problem.
Unverifiable information in the encyclopedia is kind of like images without any license information. It's such a huge problem (or at least it was a year ago) we can't just delete them all outright. But we should stop the influx of new articles like this.
Anthony