[WikiEN-l] Who was saying quantity vs quality?

[WJhonson at aol.com]

In a message dated 8/8/2008 7:30:35 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time,  
michaeldavid86 at comcast.net writes:

My  suggestion was to spend more time on improving the
quality of the Articles  that exist now.>>


---------
I'm doing my part by going through our Category of claims uncited since....  
2006! (yes they exist and there are hundreds of them) Trying to pare them  
down.  In some cases the claims have been fulfilled, just the tag  remains.  In 
other cases it's the wrong tag.  At any rate.
 
Wikipedia is heavily heavily weighted toward modern pop culture references.  
Which probably just shows that the majority of editors are not relying on 
print  sources, but on googley sources.  It's a great help that Google Books now  
exist, but that still represents a very tiny percentage of references.
 
The other day, just as a few examples.  I was looking for references  to Eba 
Anderson Lawton and we have nothing on her.  She was an author and  socialite 
at the turn of the century and her father was relatively famous.   At any 
rate, I had to make up my own article on my own site, just to prove to  myself 
that she was someone of some importance in her day.
 
As another example we have no article on "Richer of Rheims" whose work is  
quite important in filling the gap we had had (before he was re-discovered) on  
exactly how the Carolingian era ended.  Again I had to write my own article  
just to inform myself.
 
It would be instructive for some poor volunteer to go through say the first  
50 pages of the DNB and compare the articles there to whether we even have an  
article or not.  The sheer number of biographical articles we now have  
swamps what the DNB tried to do, so you'd think we'd have most of them, but  
somehow I think the true answer would be surprising.
 
Will Johnson



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