On 9/12/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/09/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
On 9/12/06, daniwo59@aol.com daniwo59@aol.com wrote:
- 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.
Why? Is there any reason to believe that improving a crappy article into a featured article is better than creating a featured article from scratch? Maybe most crappy articles are still crappy because they're not a very useful topic in the first place.
This is answered in Danny's original message, which I will therefore assume you didn't read before hitting 'reply'.
He gave examples of exceptions, but nothing to suggest whether or not these were special cases or the majority.
There's nothing wrong with creating brand new articles, as long as you're creating *good* brand new articles. To that end I think we should insist that all new articles are sourced. After a while that should be extended - all major additions to old articles must be sourced. Only then, once we've stopped the addition of new unsourced additions, can we truly start to tackle the old unsourced information.
I think what will happen is that the volunteers will do whatever the heck they feel like.
That's awfully narrow-minded. Volunteers will, of course, not do things they don't feel like doing. But there is usually a large range of things which volunteers are willing to do.
Anyway, in my opinion adding new unsourced information into the encyclopedia makes the encyclopedia worse, not better. If certain volunteers are only willing to do this, then we should respectfully decline their contribution.
Anthony