Andrew Wiley wrote:
No, they have a point. That philosophy doesn't work because at some
point, there's too much information. Too much to edit to make sure it
meets standards, too much to browse (if the links are bad enough to
parody with the Wikipedia game, how bad would they be with unlimited
content?). When you open that door, useful content gets drowned in
floods of things like useless biographies and advertisements for
things no one has heard of.
If you take a look at the discussion for the notability requirements,
no one really likes them, but no one has really found a better way to
define what's notable than to require it to have valid sources.
Without those sorts of requirements, Wikipedia becomes chaos.
I agree that pointless clutter can ruin Wikipedia.
One possible solution is to have a 'ranking' of articles, say 1 to 5 stars. A 5
star article would be notable enough that it would be likely to be in a printed
encyclopedia. A 1 star would be like a bio page on your neighbor.
Wikipedia searching then could be filtered by how many stars you want.
Any mechanical ranking system can be gamed (see the recent stories about link
farms and Google), so it would have to be moderated.
