User:Hobit/Essay

My Wikipedia Philosophy and View of the Future

The rough draft is that I feel we are A) getting way too bureaucratic (see WP:BURO and B) we are deleting too many useful (and yes, do see WP:USEFUL, but read it as what the problem is, not the way it is intended) things.  A) is nearly impossible to fix as Wikipedia grows and frankly I'm very much a person who views process as a good way to protect people/ideas/whatever.

The deleting useful things problem is, however, both a more serious problem and a fixable one. There are those (including a majority of the admin core I'd say) who believe that we already have too much "junk" and that we can't maintain what we have. They worry about libel, both from a legal viewpoint and a moral viewpoint and believe we shouldn't have material we can't police. They want less material and for it to be harder for others to add to that material without review. They would be the "quality over quantity" folks. And as much as I believe they are trying to make things better, they are actually self-defeating. They drive away editors who at some point could be good or ever great editors. And over time Wikipedia will be much less than it could have been.

The problem is that quantity over quality is also self-defeating. The Internet already has plenty of crap. What we need is high-quality coverage of a massive amount of material. One concern is that as we add more and more material, we'll find it harder and harder to keep our information accurate. So the first step is WP:V, where we basically say that information needs to be verifiable by a reliable source. This seems really important because it gives others (both users and other editors) a way to confirm the material. However, this doesn't end the worry that we'll end up with too much material to actually track. And so we have inclusion guidelines--guides about what the bar is for having an article. Initially there were guidelines by topic area, but we generally hit on the general notability guidelines. The GNG has a lot of good and bad parts, but the best part is that it provides a moderately objective measure of what should and shouldn't have an article. The downside is that we end up deleting a lot of solid, verifiable and useful articles out of fear that having so many articles will make us unable to maintain the articles we do have.

Unfortunately it also means we are A) driving away users and B) driving away editors. The users want some of the material that has been deleted. The editors whose material was deleted get discouraged. Wikipedia has seen a significant drop in editors. My experience with people I've met in the real world is that it is deletionism that drives away most. And so the urge to keep the unbridled expansion at bay infact gives us fewer editors to make sure things are accurate. We even see this deletionism creeping into the articles themselves. A very short discussion made it so that external links should generally be removed from articles (see WP:EL). Such a policy has led to the remove of (for example) the links to all the episodes of an on-line show on the argument that while it might be useful it's not really needed and a lot of people think it makes the article look bad (one extra character per link). Bah I say.

What's the solution? One is to continue to walk away from the founding principles of Wikipedia and make it so that some (or all) of the edits require approval by another editor (see WP:PC). The "encyclopedia anyone can edit" becomes something else. This would create a smaller, but still very useful and highly reliable site. But it would also be the end of a grand experiment. Another solution is to return to the wild days and just let any article exist that meets WP:V. This too seems likely to fail for exactly the reasons listed above--too many people creating too many articles will mean we will have a much higher error rate not to mention just plain bogus material due to vandalism being harder to track and fix. And the issues with false information about actual people could mean we do real harm in the real world.

Frankly, there is no good answer. The best idea I've had is to find a way to split Wikipedia down the middle and have the "confirmed to be reliable and good" and the "all the rest". Use our article ranking scheme to identify good articles (well "B class and better" maybe) and make it so that those articles are the default when searching (both here and at Google) and all the rest have a clear banner indicating that they are "unverified" or some such. Put Pending Changes WP:PC on the good one them and keep them fairly stable. Then let the rest of the articles grow more-or-less without bounds. We'd use WP:V as the inclusion guideline.

The idea has its share of flaws, but I think trying to keep balance the desire for centralized control and quality with decentralized editing and quantity is too fine of a balance to keep and the groups wanting each will otherwise tear apart the encyclopedia. And in any case, those favoring centralized control are going to win because they are willing put the time into creating the centralized structure and those "hippy-types" who want everything to be decentralized aren't.

Hobit (talk) 07:34, 20 March 2011 (UTC)