Frankly I agree with you. I've always been annoyed that the current maintenance collaboration is to create articles that have been requested for over a year. Articles are constantly requested, yet there are always requests being filled. So what do we do with the requests we cannot fill? I propose: 1. Article requests be cleaned up very thoroughly, with entries deleted if they can't be filled adequately or should not be on Wikipedia 2. Focus of experienced editor efforts be on clearing out merger backlogs, voting per specific policies in AfDs, clearing out speedy backlogs (sysops, obviously) and the like. 3. Attention be paid to the cleanup taskforce and wikification backlogs. That way we can increase the quality of the encyclopedia. It would be good if unneccessary stub articles (careful attention should be paid to whether or not the article should be deleted, but either way [[Wikipedia:Articles for undeletion]] will pile up with incidents) could be cleared out, and vandal fighting tools spread to the masses (every CVU member should know about Lupin's tool or VP/VP2/VS/MWT, for instance).
You mention that we should aim for 100,000 featured articles. I assume [[WP:ARCAID]] (merger of [[WP:COTW]] and [[WP:AID]] for those who weren't informed) will help, however I propose it be expanded so that there is more advertising of the ARCAID around Wikipedia and experienced editors are encouraged to contribute. I'm not aware of other broad attempts to improve the quality of articles (by broad I mean broad, so SCOTW and the like do not count)
How about we start a wikiproject for the cleanup taskforce? I've already established one for the wikification taskforce, it has worked very well and the wikification backlog is being cleared out quicker every day. A formalisation of the process in a wikiproject would encourage people to join in, not only to cleanup articles, but to assist in other measures like publicity for the cause which could eventually lead in many more people helping out.
And then we could have bureaucrats force 1FA upon RFAs :)
As for your competition, I suggest you give the winner the chance to donate $100 to Wikimedia instead, its an option I'd personally prefer.
-- Akash/Draicone
On 9/12/06, daniwo59@aol.com daniwo59@aol.com wrote:
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:
- 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.
- 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 _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l