> It's interesting that pg thought then that Wikipedia's problem is excessive deletionism, while I (after being a registered Wikipedian and working on various a

> It's interesting that pg thought then that Wikipedia's problem is excessive deletionism, while I (after being a registered Wikipedian and working on various articles) think that Wikipedia's problem is lack of thorough research to prepare article content. Yep, that's the usual distinction. Non-Wikipedians believe that Wikipedia should be a compendium of any information that could be useful, however unverifiable or incomplete. Wikipedians want there to be higher standards, but pg makes the common mistake of thinking this is because they are all OCD.[1] The Wikipedia system relies on group verifiability. Low quality info imposes long-term costs on the administrators. The article will be flagged more frequently than others. So pruning low quality info is a matter of administrator self-defence, even if you ignore the ideals of achieving a trustworthy encyclopedia. A Wikipedia successor would have to abandon trustworthiness (or figure out some way to indicate that certain pages were untrustworthy). Or figure out how not to impose the costs of maintaining unverifiable information on administrators. One way might be to connect the info with the community that cares about it in a more direct and intimate way. Wikipedia fails REALLY badly at the latter, to the point where the wiki-insiders sometimes have more control than the audience for a topic. > That's not easy, not easy at all, but it's not terribly expensive. In terms of software and services, it would be no problem at all. But you are overlooking the cost of creating a new Wikipedia in a world where Wikipedia already exists. Wikipedia content is also famously intractable to reuse in any system other than MediaWiki. We hope to begin alleviating that this year with the big parser redesign. A side effect should be to enable competitors to try different things with our content. [1] They are, but this is not the primary reason. ;)