On Sun, Jun 16, 2019 at 8:18 AM Mister Thrapostibongles <
thrapostibongles(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Let's look at the content first. Even on
Wikipedia's own terms, it has
failed. It is a principle that Wikipedia is founded on reliable sources,
and by its own admission, Wikipedia itself is not such a source. That
bears repetition -- a project aiming to be an encyclopaedia, that compares
itself with Britannica, explicitly is not reliable. Foundation research
has shown that about one fifth of Wikipedia articles are supported by
references that are inadequate to support the text or simply are not
there. That's about a million articles each on of the larger Wikpedias.
Some thousands of those are biographies of living people and in view of the
risk of defamation, no such articles should exist on Wikipedia at all.
There are several thousand articles that are possible copyright violations:
again such articles should not be there. And when I say "should not", I
mean according to the rules adopted by the Wikipedia volunteer community
itself.
The WMF has multiple, conflicting goals, just like the community. I don't
think you should take it as a given that the WMF will take a position that
aligns perfectly with what you want. In terms of unverified articles,
consider ACTRIAL.[1] The community approved it in in 2011, but the WMF
vetoed it for 6 years. Eventually, the trial was allowed to proceed; most
of the feared negative effects did not materialize, and the WMF made the
change permanent in response to overwhelming community support for it.
The community has been working on copyright violation issues for a long
time.[2] There are probably ways the WMF could support improvements in
this area. Maybe the WMF could even design some system that would
magically solve the problem. But it's certainly not the community standing
in the way.
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Autoconfirmed_article_creation_trial
[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyright_violations#Resources
Also consider
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2013-November/128777.html
back in 2013.