User:FreeKresge/Solutions

This article is an essay designed to stimulating thinking about ways to improve Wikipedia. The opinions below do not represent Wikipedia policy or guidelines and may or may not even be held by the author.

On another page, I discuss the reasons why I am pessimistic about Wikipedia’s chances of becoming a good reference. The main problem is that Wikipedia has over 1.8 million articles, yet only 0.2% of them meet Wikipedia’s standards for good articles. I believe that Wikipedia has two main obstacles to becoming a good reference: a focus on the needs of editors rather than the needs of users and standards that are either too low or are not widely enforced.

I do not want simply to complain without providing possible solutions, so I list a few below. I endorse some of the solutions below, but others are included simply to provoke thought. Most solutions below are based on the idea that Wikipedia can best be improved by increasing the percentage of articles that have achieved at least good article status.

Two encyclopedias
This solution would create two encyclopedias. In addition to the current Wikipedia, there would be a second encyclopedia containing only articles that have achieved good or featured article status. Because these articles are already good, editing will be limited only to approved editors. These would be editors who have made a reasonably large number of edits over a reasonably large amount of time (e.g., over 400 edits over at least six months). Furthermore, such editors would have to undergo a peer review to ensure that these editors have at least a basic understanding of Wikipedia rules and regulations and are not vandals, POV pushers, original researchers, edit warriors, etc.

This would allow the existence of a reliable reference of articles meeting or exceeding good article criteria that should be reasonably safe from disruptive edits. Such a reference might be good enough to use as an information resource for students and others who could use an up-do-date encyclopedia.

There are problems with this system. As it stands, there are only a few thousand good and featured articles, and some of them are on topics as unimportant as spoo. This solution does not provide any incentive to push articles to good or featured status. Furthermore, there might even be incentive not to push an article to good or featured status so that everyone can continue to edit it.

Project quotas
This solution would divide Wikipedia into various project, similar to the Wikiprojects that exist today except that each article would fall under one of them. Each project would have a quota. For every article in the project that is at good or featured status, the project may have one additional article. For example, if a project on the Egyptian army has four good articles and 1 featured article, it could also have an additional five articles. If one of the five articles is promoted to good article status, then the project may create another two articles. On the other hand if one of the four good articles is demoted, then the project would have to delete two articles, which may include the demoted article.

The main advantage of such a system would be to ensure that half of all articles on Wikipedia are good or featured articles. This would also reward projects that are good at promoting their articles to good and featured status.

This solution has a few issues. I fear that good article standards would be lowered in order to allow project to have more pages. If a good or featured article has declined in quality, many projects may insist that demotion would result in the deletion of very important articles. For example, a project on British-born film directors might threaten the deletion of articles on Chaplin and Hitchcock to keep an unworthy article from being demoted. Finally, there may be territorial issues involving articles that may fit in multiple project with each project trying to claim as many good and featured articles for itself while dumping other articles to other projects.

Speedy deletion of unsourced or poorly sourced articles
By unsourced or poorly-sourced articles, I mean any article that has no sources or is sourced only with blogs, forum posts, MySpace pages, YouTube pages, or pages connected to the subject or the original author. Under this proposal, any new article that is unsourced or poorly sourced could be deleted speedily. So many articles already in mainspace are also unsourced or poorly sourced, there can be a period of time to source them. Specifying specific sources as being poor does not mean that all other sources are necessarily acceptable. It just means that other sources may need further examination through a prod or articles for deletion.

Unsourced and poorly sourced pages are largely useless. Therefore, there is no reason for these pages to exist. This policy would also emphasize the need for sourcing. Furthermore, the presence of sources would make it much easier for editors reviewing the page to judge its notability.

Time limit to reach good article status
Under this solution, an article would have a set time, say two years, for an article to reach good article status. If it does not do so, it should be assumed that there is not enough interest in the topic to have a page. There is no need for such articles, so they can be deleted. Short extensions may be granted for articles that are close to good articles status or for articles that failed because of edit warring or persistent vandalism. Existing articles that are at least one year old can be given a full year from the implementation of this policy to achieve good article status.

The main concern with this solution is that good article standards may be lowered in order to keep pages approaching the deadline. Furthermore, there are a lot of articles that are already over two years old that have yet to receive good article status.

Bad article as deletion criterion
Many articles in Wikipedia not only fail good article criteria but are bad. They may not be patent nonsense, but they may be poorly written or have serious POV issues or focus entirely on trivial matters. Usually, such pages are kept and given cleanup tags. This would take effect only if there are no decent versions to revert to, and any article that is listed at articles for deletion solely for this reason should not get a snowball delete in order to provide time to clean it up.

Right now, there are many bad pages on Wikipedia. They do not necessarily fall under current deletion criteria, but their existence sends the message that bad pages are acceptable. As a result, they encourage the creation of more bad pages. Implementation of this policy can send a message that Wikipedia expects good work.