It seems that the debate about to fork or not to fork at once is actually a discussion about how bad WP really is. Tactical and strategic considerations aside, the answer to the second determines one's position regarding the former. Larry's position in this matter is clear: "Wikipedia has 1.4 million not-too-bad articles (in English)." Others, like Darren Duncan, seem to agree that "most Wikipedia content being good and that which needs fixing up to be a minority, though sizable minority." To truly answer the question about WPs real quality we need to differentiate between real encyclopaedic content and fluff, and then to size up the the extent of encyclopaedic content we have to deal with. I have conducted three min-researches into this question: two to estimate the fluff-to-content ratio, and one to estimate the quality of content. For the purpose of those researches, I've defined "fluff" as all the articles that would not be been included in an encyclopaedia or would be deleted by any reasonable section editor (e.g., database articles like information about a small village copied unmodified from a database, one line stubs, dictionary definitions masquerading as articles, etc); and articles that have an "administrative" nature (e.g., disambiguation pages, articles that contain lists, etc.). A lot of the "fluff" stuff is simply "over-splintering" -- that is, it is WP trying to re-create a poor-men's imitation of ImDB, Sci-fi fan sites, Album collections, or population registries. I am an inclusionist at heart myself, so I can understand the motivation to start an article about every film by every director and every Album by every band (eradicate the red meanies!) and then proceed to do the same with every song in every album. The end result, though, is either a trivia article or meaningless data (who played what instrument). I've conducted two mini-searches, each containing a random sample 500 articles. Both samples gave a fairly consistent result: * Not an encyclopaedic article - 32 percent * One-line stubs, database articles - 14 percent * Lists, disambiguation, date - 10 percent One can decide, of course, to import the fluff, regardless of quality, but this is more a "political" (tactical or strategic) consideration. Of around 620.000 articles that still remain, the split was as following: * Copied Articles (legally or illegally) - 18.2 percent * Articles labelled as needing a rewrite of some sort by WP - 20.4 * Borderline articles (such that I could not decide whether they belong in an encyclopaedia or not) - 27.3 * Acceptable articles (not estimated for quality) - 34.1 Copied articles, whatever the source, should also not enter our considerations here. Obviously, articles copied from EB, other old encyclopaedias or Governmental sources should be either directly imported from those sources or re-written, but they're not a WP article. This leaves us with about 507,000 articles which need be considered as acceptable material for import, at least procedurally. It is not encouraging, of course, that just a little more than 200,000 articles pass unquestionably as legitimate encyclopaedic articles -- and that before we even start considering their content. In practical terms, this means that out of 1.4 articles imported with a all-at-once about 1.2 will be deleted by moderately strict editors even before starting to edit the more worthy stuff. -- A third mini-research I conducted was accessing and assessing articles from WP alphabetically. I took as my starting point articles in EB 1911 from A to Aboukir, and a reasonable "branching" (articles referred to from those). This included 173 articles in the list and 213 "branched" articles (total of 386). My method was to assess the quality of the articles and then re-write them. I managed to re-write only a portion of those (275, to be exact). Here, I do not have exact results but more general impressions and rough estimates. About half the articles were marked as "incorporating" stuff from EB 1911. "Incorporating" here usually meant copied verbatim, with wikification. Of the other half, about half (i.e. 25 percent) were copied from EB or other tertiary sources, but without a clear notification (this also leads me to suspect that the figure of just 8 percent copied material is way smaller than the actual figure). Only a handful of articles where based on material I could not locate with a quick internet search. The quality of the articles, when not copied from this or that tertiary source, was dismal. My estimate, based on these and other rather extensive reviews of sections of the WP where I have a clue, is that at least in the humanities (art, history, culture, music, literature, philosophy, and religion, etc.) the ratio of acceptable non-copied articles to unacceptable is roughly 1:10 -- one acceptable, 9 should be deleted and re-written. With traditional encyclopaedias, humanities articles (especially history articles) are the backbone of content. During the past century, the balance tilted somewhat toward more content from the exact sciences and natural science, but the typical encyclopaedia article is probably still a biography article or an article about a historic event, social or cultural phenomenon. Importing all-at-once would mean, then, that to get a minority of about 30 to 40 thousand worthy articles in the sciences, we'll have to import about 150,000 articles of which 90 percent will need a complete re-write. To illustrate this, I chose several paragraphs in those areas from WPs pride and joy list of "Featured Articles". I could only choose as examples articles about subjects I know a little about, but I can say with some certainty that even based on one paragraph, that such featured articles would not be acceptable even as starting points to a real encyclopaedic entries. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_Velázquez Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez (June, 1599 – August 6, 1660), commonly referred to as Diego Velázquez, was a Spanish painter, the leading artist in the court of King Philip IV. He was an individualistic artist of the contemporary baroque period, important as a portrait artist. His two visits to Italy while part of the Spanish court are well documented. In addition to numerous renditions of scenes of historical and cultural significance, he created scores of portraits of the Spanish royal family, other notable European figures, and commoners, culminating in the production of his masterpiece, Las Meninas (1656). Problems: Anachronism, inaccuracies, irrelevant comments, grammar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Dalí Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí Domènech or Salvador Felip Jacint Dalí Domènech (May 11, 1904 – January 23, 1989), known popularly as Salvador Dalí, was a Catalan-Spanish artist who became one of the most important painters of the 20th century. A skilled draftsman, he is best known for his surrealist work identified by its striking, bizarre, dreamlike images. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters.[1] His best known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in 1931. In addition to painting, his artistic repertoire included film, sculpture, photography, and an Academy Award-winning short cartoon, "Destino," on which he collaborated with Walt Disney; it was released posthumously in 2003. An artist of great imagination, Dalí had an affinity for doing unusual things to draw attention to himself. This sometimes irked those who loved his art as much as it annoyed his critics, since his eccentric manner sometimes drew more public attention than his artwork.[2] Problems: POV, grammar, balance of statements, grammar again http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitsch Kitsch is a German term that has been used to categorize art that is considered an inferior copy of an existing style. The term is also used more loosely in referring to any art that is pretentious or in bad taste, and also commercially produced items that are considered trite or crass. Because the word was brought into use as a response to a large amount of art in the 19th century where the aesthetic of art work was confused with a sense of exaggerated sentimentality or melodrama, kitsch is most closely associated with art that is sentimental, mawkish, or maudlin; however, it can be used to refer to any type of art that is deficient for similar reasons—whether it tries to appear sentimental, glamorous, theatrical, or creative, kitsch is said to be a gesture imitative of the superficial appearances of art. It is often said that kitsch relies on merely repeating convention and formula, lacking the sense of creativity and originality displayed in genuine art. Problems: weasel words, definition missing important elements, unclear http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Renaissance The Italian Renaissance began the opening phase of the Renaissance, a period of great cultural change and achievement in Europe that spanned the period from the end of the 14th century to about 1600, marking the transition between Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Although the origins of a movement that was confined largely to the literate culture of intellectual endeavor and patronage can be traced to the earlier part of the 14th century, many aspects of Italian culture and society remained largely Medieval; the Renaissance did not come into full swing until the end of the century. The word renaissance (Rinascimento in Italian) literally means “rebirth”, and the era is best known for the renewed interest in the culture of classical antiquity after the period that Renaissance humanists labelled the Dark Ages. These changes, while significant, were concentrated in the elite, and for the vast majority of the population life was little changed from the Middle Ages. Problems: bad definition (began the opening phase), grammar, grammar, Anachronism Ori Redler |
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