
Look This Up on Wikipedia: How Big Is Too Big? - terpua
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/29/look-this-up-on-wikipedia-how-big-is-too-big/
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GavinB
Wikipedia is not continuing to grow because its policy is to delete articles
whose subjects aren't covered in the mainstream press.

The mainstream press, on the other hand, is shrinking every month.

The current definition of notability is like Newtonian physics. It's useful,
but must eventually be replaced by a more nuanced model.

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halo
At the moment, Wikipedia relies on the press to verify the truth. How do you
suggest Wikipedia verifies the truth without relying on the press and other
scholarly sources?

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gojomo
A good question -- and there are at least two dimensions: (1) using
traditional publication coverage to evaluate 'notability'; and (2) using
traditional publications as sources of information.

I personally would jettison 'notability' for 'usefulness', and improve the
procedures for allowing 'self-published' material -- even up to original
research and the testimony of primary sources -- to provide Wikipedia content,
as long as it's true.

Yes, that's harder than just deferring to traditional high-reputation news and
academic publishers. But those publishers are retreating, while the need for
reference information is growing, and this problem needs the boldness of the
wiki-model, even as Wikipedia has become squeamish about such experimentalism.

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gchucky
So let's say I build some kind of application. And I create a website for it
and a Twitter account and whatever else. Should there be a Wikipedia article
for that? By having lower notability standards, there would be, as the article
could use the sources I created. Seems to me that there shouldn't be an
article for that, though, as that's really just a case of self-promotion and
advertising. Besides, there really isn't anything particularly notable about
the product itself, is there? It's just something I made on my own in a few
days.

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gojomo
By the 'true and useful' standard, yes. If someone wants to write it, why stop
them?

Whether your app dies in obscurity or explodes in popularity, if Wikipedia
could collect true and useful info about it, why exert extra effort to exclude
or erase that info?

If there's a topic that only a dozen people in the world (currently) care
about, but one or two of them are willing and able to write neutral,
reference-style articles about that topic that will be of interest to the next
dozen people, why exile that work elsehwere because of traditional standards
of 'notability' based on the idea of limited staff time and print-page column-
inches?

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fnid
What's the obsession with constant growth? Why does wikipedia need to keep
growing? It's not going to disappear if its user base stops growing. People
will still edit. People will still read it. It'll probably get better if it
slows down a bit and starts to get real.

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duskwuff
Indeed. And, even if Wikipedia can't sustain infinite exponential growth, that
hardly means that it's failed.

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darien
Certainly, information isn't necessarily governed by Moore's law, it's
information processing that is! Exponential information creation would require
an exponential rise in population, and that's just not the case - thankfully.

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duskwuff
That, and Wikipedia has been growing far more quickly than the world's
population, or even Moore's Law, can account for. At a certain point, a
carrying capacity is bound to be reached.

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gritzko
I think the reasons for the decay were already widely discussed everywhere:
1\. there is a great amount of rules and guidelines which worsen the learning
curve 2\. quite often, articles are owned by "shepherds", who tend to rollback
outsider contributions (because they have their own perfect vision in their
heads); this contributes to despair of occasional contributors 3\. because the
topmost reasons to be a winner in a editor dispute are (a) persistence and (b)
bone-headness

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bkovitz
These problems get a lot of attention because people tend to whine loudly
about them. But the vast majority of articles are not affected by them.

Except possibly the learning curve. I think the fact that Wikipedia is just a
little bit difficult to edit has helped it enormously. That filtered out the
people who post the sort of junk you see on YouTube, digg, reddit, etc.

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teeja
WP's a lot more daunting than it used to be for a newcomer. Every now and then
I see an article where someone came along, dumped in a bunch of text (unique
if not original), and ran away from merging it.

They could _really_ use a hand-holding (offline?) editing environment.
Stylistic expectations now are daunting for a noob - and their online help is,
well, badly organized might be kind.

