User:Konveyor Belt/On the Myth that only content builders are WP:HERE

Note, this essay first written at [1]

I've seen this idea pushed by some people, and it is wrong.

While many of the ideas they present are fairly sound, their overall point is troubling. To get rid of all rules and only focus on content is IMO a bad thing. We need civility and editors who behave at Wikipedia, and we need them more than ever in light of the recent Gender Gap Task force issues, which I seem to remember a lot of good content contributors were pulled into.

Civility

And in order to enforce civility, there must be a system of enforcers and reporters. This is ANI, AIV, and other places. ANI is always characterized as being just a drama board where editors hack it out, but it is needed. A poor ANI is better than no ANI at all.

Administrators are needed both to assist the creators of content and to monitor the creators themselves. What they seem to want is an encylopedia where there are no rules, where content remains supreme. This presents problems in both content and editors. Content will become increasingly editwarred over with no dispute resolution. Editors will frquently butt heads and become argumentative, and content will be left behind. The best way to ensure content is created is to not focus on content at all.

1 million stubs

Is generally better than a select few of FAs. Blofield calculates that 1 in 167 articles are GAs or FAs. For 1 million stubs (a purely hypothetical amount, that is roughly 6,000 FAs. If we take away those million stubs, we only have 6,000 FAs. Assuming that all are important subjects, there are still things that are left out. The vast majority of plant and animal articles are left out as being non notable for an FA. Same with most cities if they are not the capitol of something.

If with 2 hours of time an editor could produce half an FA or 30 stubs, I'd take the stubs every time, even if they are lacking in content. You wanna know why? Because even if they are a stub, they are there, and any random editor can add to them, whereas newbies might not want to write about it other wise, because they'd have to create an article. And there high rules and regulations associated with that. And half an FA is not even good enough for an article if it is incomplete.