User:Demi/Overhead

One of the "arguments" for inclusionism is that extra content one doesn't care about, or that isn't encyclopedic, does no harm. If one doesn't want to read it, one isn't forced to, right? Wikipedia isn't paper, right?

Sources of overhead
But the overhead associated with an article's existence does not just stem from paper, or disk space, or other technical surrogate. Some sources of overhead:

Conflict
Every article has the potential for a dispute, fight or some other conflict (sometimes only tangentially related to the article). A huge amount of virtual ink has been spilt over Kimi Finster and many similar articles. All of this is time taken not just from participants, who arguably wouldn't be working on anything if they weren't working on "their" article; but from administrators, mediators, and other people who need to spin cycles discussing, suppressing or otherwise wringing their hands over the conflict.

Scanning
Work on Wikipedia is divided up in any number of ways, depending on peoples' interest. Some work on particular articles and subject matters, others work on particular kinds of tasks, like copyediting or other cleanup. I recently started trying to correct "based off" (in the sense of "based on") in articles. What I found was that Pokémon-, comic-, cartoon-, anime-, car-, and gun-related articles had a lot of instances--almost 600. There is an effort cost associated with any such task that increases with the number of articles to scan. The fact is, having a larger number of articles slows Wikipedia down.

Review
This is somewhat related to scanning efficiency, but is more geared toward change review. Review of existing content on Wikipedia is largely limited to change review, either through watchlists or recent changes. The larger the number of articles, relative to how fast they're changing, the less likely it is that any particular article will be changed, and thus appear 'for review' in one of the above sources. Since the strength of Wikipedia presumably lies in the review of many eyes, the quality of Wikipedia is reduced by having a large number of articles. Consider the case of John Seigenthaler Sr., where a bad edit remained in place for some months. The fix for that kind of thing is increased attention, and that's countered by a large number of stagnant articles.