On 11/15/05, kosebamse@gmx.net kosebamse@gmx.net wrote:
As soon as they stray away from the featured article on the front page, or happen to run into the random pages, their impression will be not favorable. That's what I tried to find to out with my twenty random pages.
I submit that the vast majority of the truly awful pages on Wikipedia are very hard to find without the Random Page function, because they're very poorly linked into the site. There are many substandard articles on important topics, but much fewer that are utterly horrible.
But it IS getting in the way. I have recently spent several hours patrolling the newpages and recent changes, and that was a very sobering experience.
Another point of view is that it's getting in the way of only those editors who patrol New Pages. The flow of new pages is not so large that we are having trouble coping, and the harm of most of these is minimal, since they're not linked into the rest of the site. The only reason to patrol New Pages at all is that it's easier to weed out the utter crap at the point of entry.
Another thought experiment: What if we shut down new page creation for a year? Simply declare 2006 the year of quality improvement and accept no new pages until 2007.
Frankly, if we did that, I quit. I'm sure I'm far from alone.
But we could start lifting the quality of the average article to where it belongs, and we would have a chance to lift our reputation beyond the "public toilet" image that has deservedly been bestowed upon us.
You care too much about the public image, frankly. You hear the complaints louder than the praise, and louder than the silent praise of all those people who, day after day, use Wikipedia for information.
Some parts of Wikipedia are frankly awful, yes; I submit that a good proportion of them don't matter. They're on topics nobody gives a damn about.
Making the barriers to entry harder is a tempting thought, but among these newbies and dabblers are tomorrow's admins and writers. A small proportion of them, granted, but making it harder decreases the flow of good people as well as bad people.
Yes, I'm an eventualist. From my point of view, Wikipedia has a long, long way to go, and that's not a bad thing. It's that the sum total of useful human knowledge is so vast. There are many subject areas that Wikipedia's coverage is scant or wholly lacking. Yet, at the same time, there are articles on Wikipedia that are better than ANY other online resource. I am sure there are some that are better than ANY published article, on or offline. Isn't that something to feel good about?
-Matt