[WikiEN-l] Profoundly bad idea.

[charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com]

Robth wrote

> 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.

Well, you'll notice that the _unselective_ wish o have everything sourced to the hilt is aggravating this. 

We have always had the 'piles'. The question is more like: are the quality initiatives proposed fit for purpose? 

Labelling with [[Category:Living persons]] is good, because it addresses a serious issue. Fretting about the quality of pop-culture articles is fairly pointless, on that scale. Deleting dodgy images is good (my take - I'm a text person first and foremost); it is quite true that images are worth at least 1000 words, but getting the text straight is the foundation. 100K 'featured articles' - did nothing for me. Getting a page up per surname, i.e. at least 10000 dab pages of the kind most people pay no attention to: very useful, because it inherently opens up the navigation and checking.

And so on. Just let's acknowledge that quality beefs should be prioritised.

Charles

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