[Wikipedia-l] Quality vs Quantity

[Mark Clements]

"Thomas Dalton" <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>
wrote in message
news:a4359dff0704271734h1dbf5e98lf5fc65da1978b313 at mail.gmail.com...
> > But I do think we should discuss it... is it better to have 1000 stubs
> > or 100 long well-written articles?
>
> I think the key point here is when you want the encyclopedia to be
> good. If you want it to be good now, then 100 long articles is best.
> If you want it to be good in a couple of years, then 1000 stubs
> (assuming they are good stubs, but that's another debate) is better.
>
> This is based on the assumption than stubs will eventually become
> articles (and faster than non-existent pages do). This would suggest
> that younger wikis will have more stubs.
>
> Any guesses on what happens to wikis at the 20,000 edits mark? It's an
> amazingly sharp cutoff.

I am primarily a reader/editor of en.wp, and if I enter a topic into the
search and there is no article for it I tend to assume that either (a) the
article exists under some other name, (b) the important information relating
to the topic is already covered in some other related article or (c) the
topic failed one of en.WPs exhaustive criteria for inlclusion and so is not
welcome.

Therefore I do nothing.

In the 'good old days' I would (time permitting) write a stub for that
topic.  However, nowadays I tend to assume that my contribution would not be
welcome (either because the topic is already covered, or because it
deliberately does not have an article).

The point being that I would expect stub article creation to be pretty high
in new Wikipedias, and to tail off as the Wikipedia in question comes to be
seen as more authoritative.

--
- Mark Clements (HappyDog)




- Mark Clements (HappyDog)