On 12/5/06, The Cunctator cunctator@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.