[WikiEN-l] good example of overuse of {{fact}}

[Steve Summit]

geni wrote:
> On 10/15/06, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
>> So (as ever) some care is needed here; anyone who got the idea
>> that "any fact left uncited for 7 days may/must be removed"
>> would be setting themselves or the encyclopedia up for a fall.
>
> We don't have the manpower.

But that's not even the point.  If the notion got entrenched that
*any* fact-tagged statement left unattended for more than a week
could be summarily deleted, I do dare to speculate that it would
lead to abuses, completely apart from the question of whether
every fact-tagged statement would receive proper attention.

Besides which, I don't think it's too meaningful to say that
we "don't have the manpower".  We have *vast* quantities of
manpower, more than we sometimes know what to do with.  We've
currently got, on average, something like 130 edits being made
each minute, day in, day out.  That's almost 200,000 edits per
day, and over 2 per second.  Now, it's true, many of those are to
talk pages, and the rest are spread out over more than a million
articles, and some fraction of those are drive-by vandalism, but
still.

Wikipedia wouldn't exist in its current form if it didn't have
near-infinite manpower available to it.  Many aspects of
Wikipedia are clearly impossible due to "lack of manpower",
yet seem to work just fine anyway.  In fact, Wikipedia is one of
my two examples (along with, um, Microsoft) of the successful
application of the Mongolian Hordes technique.  (Oddly enough we
still don't have an article on this technique, but the Jargon
File does.)