In reality, we have actual editors, with their own interests, and it is very difficult to get them to work on anything but what they want to work on, especially for things that need a serious referencing effort beyond the googles. Most of them do have access to a library with at least some books and some commercial databases, but it's proven almost impossible to persuade them to use anything beyond arm's reach--or to even use what material their local library has put within arms reach to its community.
Many of the topics not presently included are very important--I came here primarily to work on some of them, before I got diverted to immediate rescues--and now just defending articles long enough to let people rescue them. If prospective deletors did follow WP:BEFORE, we could free up the half-dozen or so people who now mainly do fixes on articles that should have been improved, rather than nominated for deletion, but this is many fewer people than are needed The only effective way to get these topics worked on is to attract users who want to work on them. Some of the other language Wikipedias seem to have been more successful in this regard. Perhaps they have a friendlier attitude towards article writers and a more mature environment, or perhaps article writers in those communities are more willing to write in a way that does not display ownership and arouse hostility from other editors. Discouraging the people who want to work on popular culture will just discourage those who might develop into editors on other topics also. David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 4:09 PM, Charles Matthews <[email protected]> wrote: > Gwern Branwen wrote: > > >Charles Matthews wrote >>> 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? > >> >> I realize it isn't one of your options, but if I really had such a >> crack team? I'd dispatch them to AfD. > Oh, but it was meant to be a sub-option of "(d) researching for articles > where the initial submission was clearly under-researched". Because the > discussion is meant to be about rescuable articles. And if the topic is > just nonsense, you can't rescue it with refs. It seems clearly wrong to > wait for the AfD nomination before upgrading, so this is the broad form > of class of articles that we are thinking about here. >> >> All the other areas are ones where effort would be repaid with no >> multipliers. In a way, if an article hasn't been created on an old >> topic yet (your red links, your topic lists), then that alone shows it >> isn't important. Likewise, if a longstanding article needs work, then >> doesn't its longstandingness show that it isn't apparently all *that* >> awful because someone would've fixed it up if it was so bad and they >> cared about it? > Tell me this isn't true. No, really, encyclopedias do not consist of > "important" topics only. And in fact being comprehensive is our > strongest suit anyway. (And don't tell me there are no important > geographical articles we're missing, because that is definitely false.) > > The article that gets of the order of a few thousand hits a year may not > look like much to a traffic snob. The point I would like to make is that > 50,000 of those make up a huge total number of hits. >> Worse is Better. Nobody will think better of Wikipedia if some old >> article gets a dozen references and some tags removed. But the editors >> of an article *will* remember it if an angel swooped in and saved >> their article and laid the groundwork for improvements. >> > Depends on your priorities. It being all about editors and not at all > about readers is not what I believe, certainly. > > Charles > > > > > _______________________________________________ > WikiEN-l mailing list > [email protected] > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l > _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
