On Mon, Jul 6, 2015 at 11:53 AM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijs...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hoi, > When people do not edit Wikipedia we are talking about a situation that > does not exist. > > I wholeheartedly disagree with you as you mistake the process with the > product. Our aim is to produce a product and we should endeavour to provide > it in a SMART way. We lose out when we do not do the best we can. Our best > is NOT sitting on our hands keeping information that is available to > ourselves for secondary reasons. Yes, we can write articles and yes they > may be better but as long as we do not provide information we do a half > arsed job. A job that is qualitatively and quantitatively inferior. > Thanks,
This is a kind of discussion that cyclically comes back, and I guess there is no correct answer. Wikipedia was born on the internet, and is designed to work on the internet, which means that as soon as it provides good links and good connection between links, it helps to get access to knowledge. It is not something that is supposed to be read from the beginning to the end (it's simply too big), so it is difficult to talk about the quality of the product as a whole. There are good articles, bad articles, wrong articles, uncovered topics; so the experience really depends on the reader's needs. Automatically created articles generally offer a good base, they're as accurate as their sources in providing basic data, and are often a good base to build upon. In some cases no one will build upon them, but even thus they do fulfill a need. Indicators are a simplification of a more complex object, so they can only tell a limited amount of things. We know that article count can be inflated by automatically creating stubs on very specialistic topics, average page weight by adding code-rich templates and so on, but as soon as people are aware of the fact, I don't see the problem. We are now at a stage where a huge number of articles already exist, and where a big share of the creation content can be automated; if we stop now building the encyclopedia, we still have a great product that can help people; a lot of data could be kept up to date using only automated tools, although it will eventually look "old". At the end of the day, classical Latin literature has had no active community for centuries, and is still perfectly usable. Marco (Cruccone) _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
