[WikiEN-l] Forest fire week

[Andrew Gray]

On 12/10/2007, charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:

> So I propose you first inform a couple of hundred hardened speedy nominators,
> prodders and AfD regulars that this is not yet official. Create articles, youse
> bums!

I just wrote a long chewy email to an outside correspondent arguing
that a surprising amount of our problems are due to people not writing
enough articles. Not because we don't have enough - we have huge
amounts of them - but because so many of our most active and
ubiquitous users are massively and fundamentally disconnected from the
fundamental activity of the project.

Vandal-fighting and link-fixing and spam-weeding is all well and good,
but unless you set aside an hour every now and again to read
something, consider it, synthesise it, distill that down and write a
nice clear encyclopedic summary... well, you're going to end up
forgetting why we do what we do.

It might be a trivial topic. It might not be of much use to the
encyclopedia, all things considered. But it'll put your own work in
context, and *you'll* be much more use to the encyclopedia as a
result.

(This has been your dreary-Friday-afternoon manifesto. Go forth and annotate.)

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk