David Goodman wrote: > The deletion of improvable articles > because the small number of participants at AfD who are interested > and willing to rescue them is one of the reasons for people losing the > interest in Wikipedia. Counterfactually, suppose you had a team of "universal" researchers you could assign to work on articles. What relative weight would you give to various types of work? Out of these, (a) filling in popular redlinks, (b) working over topic lists from other reference works, (c) fact-checking and referencing long-standing articles on the site that really are not shaping up, (d) researching for articles where the initial submission was clearly under-researched, which seem to you most important factors in developing the site as a whole? Which, for example, are going to do most to cure systemic bias? Which are going to help our reputation in the academic world? Which are going to do most for general reliability? And which (your point) could have the most impact on the community?
I kind of feel most thoughtful people long-term on the site have voted with their feet on these issues. It would be surprising, of course, if self-assignment of tasks also corresponded to any particular person's view of the correct allocation of priorities. (Only one of the 20 items culled from AfD has any historical content, the foolish [[shield-mate]], only one takes us outside the Anglosphere to the 90% of the world's population who don't think in English, and so on. You may well be right that something could be salvaged in some cases by good research. Which is why I'd like to see the "cost" of diverting people onto such work as part of the assessment.) Charles _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
