User:The Cunctator/Wikipedia Quality

or, Going Deeper and Wider
my take is that you can define the quality of Wikipedia to be a function of both the depth of coverage (using that as shorthand for the whole specific/accurate/verifiable/sourced class of concepts) and the breadth of coverage ( i.e. not missing information).

In fact, I would think that one *should* define the quality of Wikipedia as a function of both.

Then the "quality" of Wikipedia doesn't necessarily go down when you add more material -- though the average "depth" will go down. Similarly quality doesn't necessarily go up when you make content rules more restrictive, since every day the amount of potential information to be included in Wikipedia increases by some completely unreasonable amount (thus the average breadth goes down).

If our goal is to consistently have the overall quality of Wikipedia to go up (or at least stay stable) then that allows us to recognize that we should have standards for new material, but not to the degree that they overly restrict the inflow of new material. Where that inflection point exists is of course a matter of debate, but we can break down the relevant factors:
 * what is the average initial depth of included material
 * what percentage of the current universe of outside knowledge is represented on Wikipedia
 * at what rate does the depth of included material increase over time (i.e. how fast does unsourced material get sourced, grammar improved, copyright of images checked, specificity increase, etc.)
 * at what rate does the universe of outside knowledge increase over time (how much news is there every day?)

Again, these are all pretty damn subjective but it gives us a guide for understanding how to consider policies or the wisdom of spending energy and time deleting Dark Jedi from Wikipedia or merging franked mail into franking or concept mining into taxonomic classification or Captaincy General of the Philippines into Spanish East Indies.