Stirling Newberry wrote:
Sanger's points do have merit, however, before
taking measures of
the kind he proposes, we should continue to place faith in the
mechanism of participatory dialectic that has produced more than
most people would have thought possible in a very short time.
Suppose Wikipedia were to introduce some restrictions, for example
that you would have to register a name before you could edit, or that
you would have to have your uploaded images "approved" by an
administrator before they can be displayed in articles. How could we
measure (in numbers) the effects of such a policy change? How much is
creativity reduced and how much is vandalism reduced by the
restriction? Can we measure this? If we can, wouldn't it be
interesting to try such a restriction for a limited time (say, a
week), while doing the measurement? Do we have any numbers of the
amount of vandalism or quality of contributions today?
Two and a half years ago, I introduced the "Biggest Wiki" page on
Meatball and pushed the "comma count" (number of articles) as the
ultimate ranking of wikis, but I guess we are past that stage now, at
least for the Wikipedias with more than 100,000 articles. In July
2002, the English Wikipedia had 35,324 articles. Today it has 467,237
articles, more than any printed encyclopedia, and still none of them
gives a decent overview of "Czech literature" from Jan Hus to Karel
Capek, Vaclav Havel and today. Instead of wish-listing for individual
articles, how can we measure the overall article quality? Just
looking for stubs is not good enough, since [[Czech literature]] is
more than a stub, but less than expected from an encyclopedia.
In 1919, this Swedish encyclopedia used two and a half pages of fine
print to cover Czech literature,
http://runeberg.org/nfci/0108.html
The supplement in 1926 adds half a page that mentions Karel Capek,
http://runeberg.org/nfcr/0476.html -- for a total of 3,000 words.
But Vaclav Havel has of course been added after that. The Swedish
encyclopedia's division of Czech literature history into three coarse
periods 900-1400, 1400-1770 and 1770-1919 is probably obsolete. The
Czech Wikipedia's article on Czech literature has a more modern
chronological division into sections and separate articles.
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik -
http://aronsson.se