User blog:LostInRiverview/Personal thoughts about the pre-5k "spree"

This comes from me personally, and does not necessarily represent the viewpoints of other admins on this wiki.

I'm a bit distraught by the festivities regarding the buildup to 5,000 articles. I have this feeling, as I watch the large green PlumbBob draw closer to the right side of the bar, that so many of the new articles created in the past few days really don't meet this Wiki's quality standards. My hunch is that the creators of these articles are creating them more for the purpose of pushing us beyond 5,000 articles, rather than to provide meaningful information about the games. This is my call out to those editors who are so excited to see this wiki push past the 5k mark.

Please realize that numbers mean very little. The number of articles on this wiki doesn't mean anything, if the quality of those articles is poor. Who cares how many articles a wiki has if none of them are written to a good quality, or contain any real information, or help at all in playing and enjoying the game? Now obviously we have thousands of well-written articles, but it would be plain wrong to say that all the articles created in the past few days are good - a startling number of them are barely relevant, barely beyond deletion or merging, and not very well written. It's easy to see that the creation of many new articles has been solely to push up the article count, similar to how an editor may make redundant edits to push up their edit count (which, by the way, is another very unimportant number).

I want to see this wiki grow as much as the next person, but I don't want to see that growth be because of sub-standard articles! I would rather this wiki have 4,000 articles and be taken seriously, than have 5,000 articles and be seen as a joke, or a site that has a lot of fluff but no real substance. That's what a lot of these articles are - fluff with no real content and no tangible contribution to the wiki. But it's clear when reading comments in the Shout Box and in the general attitude of certain users that the thought of reaching 5k overshadows rational analysis of the type of content we're creating.

I'm sorry to say, to those who are obsessive about hitting 5k, that I'm not going to look the other way or pretend that a lot of these articles are good additions to the wiki. I've already deleted and redirected a few, and I feel it is my duty to do this - not delete senselessly, but to edit, delete, merge or whatever, to fix, merge or eliminate any article, new or not, that isn't up to scratch. This is important, because when we do reach 5,000, I would very much like to know that those articles really are the best we have to offer, rather than a poor attempt to boost numbers.

So please, while you're editing and creating, forget for a minute that we're getting so close to 5,000, and think - once we've reached 5,000, what will we have to show for it? Will we have a wiki full of knowledge, or empty shells of articles with no real content inside them?

What kind of wiki do you want?

-- Patrick (LostInRiverview) (talk)(blog)(random page) 04:22, August 5, 2010 (UTC)