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> But every article on Wikipedia imposes maintenance costs on the project, because every article is an opportunity for error, and it's the responsibility of eve
by Doctor_Fegg 10y ago
> But every article on Wikipedia imposes maintenance costs on the project, because every article is an opportunity for error, and it's the responsibility of every member of the project to eliminate those errors
Indeed. The best way to answer that is to recruit more members, not to reduce the size of the project.
This article struck a chord with me as a lot of the issues are growing pains that we've been going through with OpenStreetMap. OSM is expressly not deletionist. We do have maintenance concerns - particularly in the case where "out-of-towners" come in and blitz a town, adding all the shops then leaving before a community has formed to maintain them. But our chief response to that is to try to grow our community.
FWIW, here's a page summarising the differences between OSM and Wikipedia editing philosophies: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Welcome_to_Wikipedia_users http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Welcome_to_Wikipedia_user...
- tptacek 10y agoOpenStreetMap is an impressive project, but Wikipedia is in some sense the most impressive, most ambitious project in the history of the Internet (and, because of how important the Internet is in the history of recorded human knowledge... well, &c &c &c). The active Wikipedia editing community has been remarkably stable for years (the predictions in Gwern's 2009 post do not appear to have borne out). It's a large and vibrant community. OSM is still a growth community (to wit: it is not the most important mapping project in the world, while Wikipedia is almost definitely the most important encyclopedia), and has a narrower charter. Community growth targets that might be a reasonable lift for OSM might not be for WP. There are a lot of things Wikipedia could potentially do to grow the community. But curbing deletionism isn't likely to be one of the more important ones. Deletionism is primarily an Internet message board concern. So my counterargument would be: Wikipedia should first do big things to improve participation (for instance: it can and should be made much easier, in a technical/UX sense, to write or edit an article). Then, once the community has grown, it can start turning the dials on how much vandalism and error its community can sustainable fight. I think the page you linked to is a pretty wonderful capsule summary of how Wikipedia's community differs from other communities. I hadn't read it before and am glad I did. Thanks!