[WikiEN-l] Contest and quality

[daniwo59 at aol.com]

Hello,
 
The following is a modified version of an announcement I posted on Recent  
Changes:
 
Times have changed in Wikipedia. Once, our goal was to cover as much as  
possible, to reach a million articles, to be the biggest encyclopedia in the  
world. As Jimbo said in his talk at Wikimania, we have to start changing the  
focus from quantity to quality. We have to make sure that the key articles that  
we do have are as good as possible. Rather than getting another million  
articles, I believe that we need 100,000 more Feature-quality articles. 
 
Some numbers that were run yesterday show that we have over 230,000  without 
any sources whatsoever. That's almost 20 percent of our total articles  
without any sources. Even if we were to provide sources for 15 of these articles  an 
hour, it would take upward of two years to cover them all … and this does not 
 include articles which are inadequately sourced or which contain spurious  
information, which raise this number by several orders of magnitude.
 
Before suggesting that these are all stubs, I invite you to look at some  
examples: [[Amethyst]], [[Alto saxophone]], [[Alexander I of Russia]] (who  
fought against Napoleon), [[Italian literature]], etc., etc., etc. These  articles 
are the mainstay of a quality encyclopedia. 
 
This means is that there is a lot of work ahead of us. It is time to shift  
the focus. I therefore propose two solutions: 
 
1. The field "Requests" on "Recent Changes" be changed to "Requested  feature 
articles." Instead of asking people to create brand new article, the  focus 
should be on improving existing articles. 

2. Regular contests should be held to promote article improvement. To that  
end, I will donate $100 in books and media from Amazon to the person who most  
improves an unsourced article related to history or selected from  
[[Wikipedia:Vital articles]]. The contest will end on October 7. A panel of  judges will 
be selected to decide on the entries. For more information about  what 
constitutes an "unsourced article" please contact me. For historical  reasons, this 
will be known as "Danny's third contest."

I hope to see as many people participating in this contest as participated  
in the previous two.
 
Danny