[WikiEN-l] Profoundly bad idea.

[Robth]

On 12/5/06, The Cunctator <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:
> Fix fix fix.
>
> Instead of complain complain complain delete delete delete.
>
> But hey. We're getting near the 7-year life cycle of most such innovative
> projects, so I'm expecting the major successful fork pretty soon.

The problem is this: the volume of contributions to Wikipedia by
one-time or occasional contributors who "pass-by", as it were, and add
something, is far too great for the community of steady
maintenance-oriented contributors to keep up with "fixing" all of it
as it comes in.  If we're going to place the onus on these steady
contributors to fix all this stuff, then we're going to end up with a
huge pile of stuff waiting to be "fixed" that is broken in very basic
ways; articles with no sources, images without specific enough
information, etc. This is the approach we have taken up till now, and
huge piles of stuff waiting to be fixed is exactly what we have.

The reason this is a problem is that on Wikipedia you get what you
have.  One-time or occasional contributors (and, for that matter, many
if not most fairly regular contributors) don't go read through a bunch
of policies and what-not before they add something, they just add
something that looks like it fits in with the rest of the content.
When I started contributing, I didn't list my sources, because the
Wikipedia articles I had seen while using the site didn't list theirs.
 If you have unsourced articles, "in popular culture" sections
everywhere, and too many and insufficiently labelled fair use images,
people are going to assume that those things are what you want and
give you more of them.  If we are going to improve the net quality of
Wikipedia, and maximize the benefit we receive from the contributions
of people who want to help and base their judgement of how to do so on
the type of content they have observed on the site, then we need to
either clone dedicated Wikipedians to start fixing these things night
and day or somehow cut off the inflow of stuff that needs fixing.
This proposal, with a waiting period intended to encourage the
original contributor to add sources before the article is deleted to
improve the average quality of our content (and thus the average
quality of incoming contributions), strikes me as very well thought
out.

-- 
Robth
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Robth)