User blog:Mark Otaris/Proposal: change in policy about content inclusion

There are two policies a wiki can adopt when it comes to the inclusion of content; it can be inclusive, which means that it will keep all content that may be improved on to eventually become a quality article, or exclusive, meaning that it will only keep content that is already on a good way to become quality content.

Most wikis adopt an inclusive policy because this allows the wiki to grow a lot faster, since new articles can be built on previous articles by less experienced users. It has the major disadvantage, however, of severely diminishing the average quality of articles. Wikis that adopt an exclusive policy either do it because they require a very high quality standard but still need to be open, or because they need to improve the quality of their content.

I think this wiki has come to this point. Dronian has recently posted a post on this forum about restarting the Clockwork Wiki project; this is a great initiative, and I suggest we accompany it with a policy change to an exclusive policy. This will mean that we will delete all articles that do not qualify for at least the status of "stub"; a stub is an article that is very incomplete but has enough content to be worth keeping to improve on later.

Whether an article should be included or not will be decided by the community, but since the appropriate choice will seem obvious for most articles, administrators will be allowed to delete the articles immediately in order to save time, and community members will be able to raise concerns about the deletion of an article if they disagree and in this case the article will be undeleted until a decision can be taken through consensus.

Important note: all content will be allowed in user space. This means that users can work on drafts in their user space, and host content that would not be tolerated in the main namespace in subpages of their user space. This means that all content can still exist on the wiki; this change on policy would only concern the main namespace and the other content namespaces (the class namespace, the community namespace and the catalog namespace).

This is my proposal. I believe it can help us increase astoundingly the average quality of the content on this wiki, which can in turn increase the reputation of the wiki a lot. The quantity of content on this wiki outweighs the quality of that content by too much, so we need to give a lot of focus on quality until we have established a decent balance between quality and quantity, at which point we might be able to consider going back to an inclusive policy.

You can comment this idea in the corresponding forum thread.