[WikiEN-l] Slipping quality as Wikipedia gets bigger

[Neil Harris]

Neil Harris wrote:

> Poor, Edmund W wrote:
>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Magnus Manske [mailto:magnus.manske at web.de] Sent: Wednesday, 
>>> November 02, 2005 3:56 AM
>>> To: English Wikipedia
>>> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Slipping quality as Wikipedia gets bigger 
>>> (formerlyCan you trust Wikipedia?)
>>>
>>>
>>> Well, as the author of said feature, I've been asking for a long 
>>> time what's the holdup. I'm fairly certain it is, at the very least, 
>>> ready for the planned test phase. I keep asking people what should 
>>> be fixed, but so far (that is, in the last few month) noone could 
>>> tell me the reason it remains turned off.
>>>
>>> If parts of it are broken or not up to MediaWiki standard or 
>>> Evil(tm) in some other important way, please, PLEASE tell me so I 
>>> can fix it.
>>>
>>> Should I backport it from CVS HEAD to some other branch? Which one? 
>>> Anything!
>>>
>>> So far, I've been mostly ignored.
>>>
>>> Magnus
>>>   
>>
>>
>> Please put this feature into effect immediately! If we don't like it, we
>> can always turn it off afterwards. But we will NEVER know if thousands
>> of Wikipedians will like it if we wait for an overwhelming clamor on
>> this mailing list.
>>
>> Ed Poor
>>
>>  
>>
>
> I really think that ratings are vital, in order to deal with improving 
> and maintaining Wikipedia's quality as its size and audience scales. 
> If the ratings code is a performance, hog, at least trying it 
> experimentally will find out how bad the problem is, and perhaps 
> illuminate how it could be fixed to make it better. I can think of 
> lots of potential strategies for doing this, but it would be nice to 
> see the problem in reality, rather than in theory, before trying to 
> fix it.
>
> Perhaps the rating code could be turned on only for admins, or users 
> with usernames beginning with 'E' to 'J', or only during non-busy 
> hours... or automatically turned off if load rises over a pre-set limit?
>
> Or perhaps just turned on for a few hours one weekend, to see what the 
> effect on load really is?
>
> -- Neil
>
>
Just to clarify this: I'm not proposing to permanently restrict rating 
to admins or any other subgroup -- any user, logged in or not, should 
eventually be able to rate articles, just as they can edit them.

The idea of restrictions is to solely prevent initial testing from 
killing the system, after which the range of allowed users can be 
progressively increased, eventually to include all users as soon as 
system resources or code optimization permit.

The sooner the system is tested, the sooner it can be in shape for full 
production use.

-- Neil