On Saturday 08 March 2008 02:36, Ian Woollard wrote:
Um. I think we want people to read the wikipedia though.
I don't see why. Personally, I couldn't care less.
Why would people bother contributing if nobody reads it?
Because it's fun.
Do our audience want us to be high in google rankings?
There's subtle problems with abandoning notabilty, like every corner store in the entire damn world would want and would be able to get a wikipage.
And what's wrong with that?
That's one of the important functions that notability deals with, without it, every single tiny company in the whole world will have an article for business reasons,
So? As long as it's factual and NPOV, what do we care WHY it's there?
So ANY junky article in the wikipedia, is BIG in web terms. Do we have a responsibility to the rest of the web? Not per se. But the rest of the web decides how big we are and they can diminish us;
So what?
that could well mean that our current best articles become a lot less significant.
So what?
Not if the wikipedia has an article on almost every word in the English language, which it soon will have, and has effectively SEO'd a bunch of non notable articles on any particular topic up above the rest of the web. I say that it's really not a good idea at all for the wikipedia to do that; they trust us, and we must not abuse that trust.
We don't ask them to trust us; we have no responsibility to maintain it.
No, I said that they valued covering everything HIGHER than they valued quality, and I stand by that assessment.
It's a correct assessment. Why is it wrong to hold that position?