On 4/1/07, William Pietri <william(a)scissor.com> wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
I would answer: don't bother, because it will
be such an utter
clusterfuck and PR disaster (relevant since it's basically a PR-driven
initiative) that the fine details really don't matter.
I hadn't thought about it in that light, but you're completely right.
It would be a major tech news story, and a lot of them wouldn't be
positive. It could be easily written as a "Wikipedia admits Wikipedia
model a failure" story. Even friendly ones would ask why, and the
headline could well end up as "Wikipedia bans new articles after
'ruining lives'".
That's not to say it isn't the right thing to do if the model really is
a failure. But I'm not there yet.
William
I disagree entirely, it could quite easily be spun positively. "Wikipedia
changes focus to fixing errors." That's already what Jimbo's been saying, so
it's not much of a change. Yes, perhaps we'd lose some people, but what
about the thousands of people who've heard about how unreliable Wikipedia is
because of all the news stories about how we fucked up somewhere? We need a
better reputation, and the only way to get that is to fix our problems. No,
we might not get a shift of contributions from new article creation to
cleaning up, and many of those people might stop contributing altogether
until the lock is lifted, but it still gives the cleaning crews time to
catch up. Right now, thousands upon thousands of articles need fixing, and
that grows every day. If we can get that down to a reasonable level, we
might be able to keep up with the new articles later, instead of sticking
them in a category for a year before they're first looked at.