Concrete priorities
You know, i'm an awful Unbeliever and a first rate Skeptic Editor ;)
I think that too many contributors reflect currents consumerist societies with the prescribed idea that "More the better" declined into "More informations the better" and "More articles the better".
What is flawed it while it does give some quantitative feel good sense, it nevertheless results that too many subjects are covered in a superficial way as some editors sole answer on how to improve the coverage of a subject in Wikipedia is "More spin-out articles".
A year ago i heard a criticism of Wikipedia giving only an "Horizontal form of Knowledge" failing to be a more in-depth "Vertical form of Knowledge".
KrebMarkt raises some good points about how more isn't necessarily better. Seems like the random ranting person would agree. This is one of those tough issues to articulate. To me, it would be great just to be able to say "there is a balance between quality and quantity", or that "we have to balance our goal of summarizing all human knowledge with the goal of appearing reliable". But vision tends to operate at a high level, and can be vague. It's stuff like "let's go to China" but not "let's fly at a mid-price on a weekend and stay for only 2 weeks".
That said, if somebody wanted to take a stab at adding something to the Strategic Plan/What do we believe?-Principles of the Wikimedia movement, I'd gladly work with them to make it right.
My comment above is completely reflect by fanboy/fangirl editing practice in Fiction articles.
Instead to improve the main article they spin-out article covering individual fictional characters. When they run out of fictional characters they continue on spin out with the fictional universe, terminology, technology. That done they can write spin-out on the related media of the main article, soundtracks, novels, video games and so on.
Bottom line we can and with a plethora of low quality & superficial articles yet they are informative & helpful.
How about adding a short section (to clarify a few points that may otherwise be taken out of context)? Example:
- === Corollaries ===
- A number of corollaries exist to make the above useful. These include:
- Knowledge is not necessarily the same as data - making available "the sum of all knowledge" has traditionally co-existed with recognizing the need for a degree of selectivity in the knowledge covered.
If we were going to add such a note, either as a short section or footnote, anything else important that would need saying?
No, that should be enough cause everything else is already mentioned (eg. quality)... so feel free to add it
I know we're getting into "what Wikipedia is not", which is a legitimate conversation with pretty widespread agreement. But I'd like to think we can frame quality and scope in more positive terms. I'm stumped though. If no one can come up with anything better, I think FT2 has offered a solid starting point.