Re: Proposal: improving quality on enwiki

Kirill Lokshin wrote:
> But the key issue, I think, is simply this:
prescriptive collaboration
> models do not, as a general rule, work on Wikipedia. 
The vast
> majority of editors make content contributions on
topics of their
> choice; if they're told that they *must* work on
article X, they'll
> simply refuse.
Yep, important to remember. The "incentive" could
be simply deletion; if 
someone says "adopt this article or it goes away",
then I can look at 
the article and decide if I want to take it on. If I don't
care about 
it, and nobody else does either, then why would we want to
keep it 
anyway? It's just going to accumulate bad edits and mislead
anybody who 
happens to read it.

Requiring adoption by a project is just a way to make sure
the interest 
outlives the whims of any particular editor.

It *is* a different mind set. Four years ago the attitude
was "every 
sentence is sacred"  and we
would jump through all kinds of hoops to 
save every scrap of verbiage. Now the underlying theme of
many 
discussions is what it looks like to be finished with a
topic; we want 
the geologist's accomplishments, but not the charges and
countercharges 
in the divorce, or we want one paragraph on a TV episode,
not a 
minute-by-minute transcript. Deleting unmaintained articles
is a further 
step on that road, maybe going too far, but certainly worth
pondering.

Stan


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