[WikiEN-l] semi-stuff (was Re: New York Times article)

[Steve Bennett]

On 6/23/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> We are no longer a struggling tiny project which needs to go out of our
> way to get every possible beneficial scrap of work from anyone.  We seek
> to have diverse participation from a wide range of people with different
> viewpoints, but we should also remember, always, how many good users we
> use when we are too "co-dependent" with our trolls.

Sorry to make a habit of it, but I disagree with you. At Wikipedia, I
see a small number of people working on a massive number of pages, and
the more help we get with that task, the better.  We have a constant
stream of people who come past, add a few pages, then leave - but
there is little manpower to maintain those pages. I frequently edit
pages which have not been touched in a year or more.

Sure, our US popular culture sections are totally under control, and
do not need manpower. However, pick a different area, like French
cuisine, or even any aspect of French culture, and to me it feels very
much like a "struggling tiny project". I see the same small handful of
names again and again. If there was a useful editor in this area who
was going to be banned for image uploading, I would definitely mount
an argument for retaining him without image privileges.

Maybe others see things differently, but I do not feel a massive
influx in people contributing raw, valuable text to our encyclopaedia,
which is something we're quite short of. We have lots of people
joining us to help delete, categorise, clean, or write about their own
pet topic - but do we really have so many helping to expand on our
existing topics?

Steve