What?! To keep the amount of articles low? Ok wait, why were they begging for 10 million dollars then? So they can have no content?

You understand that you just said the organization that's devoted to becoming the largest record of human knowledge is interested in keeping that large record as small as possible.

Holy crap, I officially give up. The internet is nothing but a giant never ending scene from Catch-22.

They don’t want to keep the amount of articles as small as possible, they want just the right type and amount of articles so that they can maintain them. Wikipedia depends on volunteers and I don’t think Wikimedia can afford to pay people to maintain articles [1].

If you want an article about every Pokémon and not just Pikachu you should start your own Pokémon wiki. That’s Wikipedia’s official party line. Well, at least the party line of the Deletionists (who seem to be winning).

This is a very controversial topic, the battle between Deletionists [1] and Inclusionists [2] has been raging for a long time on Wikipedia. Technical reasons really play no role in this battle.

[1] Wikimedia 2010-11 budget plan (PDF): http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/d/dd/2010-1...

[2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deletionism

[3] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Inclusionism

"If you want an article about every Pokémon and not just Pikachu you should start your own Pokémon wiki. That’s Wikipedia’s official party line. Well, at least the party line of the Deletionists (who seem to be winning)."

This is exactly why I, like Zed, am sitting here wondering why precisely you think _I_ should donate so "deletionists" can have their own private party with their own stupidly applied overgeneralised rules? Maybe someone should start a wiki listing these other non-wikipedia-wikis, so I could go to some of them to donate instead.

I don’t think you should do anything and hell is going to freeze over before I defend deletionists beyond pointing out the argument they are actually making.

Sorry, I didn't mean "you" personally, but "you, the holders of the wikipedia official party line".

Any time I find two groups of people arguing and waring over a boolean definition of themselves I can usually find a third option. I also know that they'll never adopt the third option because fighting and winning stupid wars like this makes people feel powerful.

If only Wikimedia had enough $ to afford maintainers. Oh wait..

They really don't. $16M to curate 3.5 million articles? That's 38 minutes of work per article from minimum-wage temps. That would cover one pass over the English edition alone, with nothing left to pay for hosting nor all the other languages. No, they would have to raise hundreds of millions or more to stop relying on scarce volunteer editors.

If you include the next nine Wikipedias with the most articles there are already eleven million articles to maintain. $16 million would pay for ten minutes per article per year (assuming $8 per hour which might not even be possible).

Wikimedia will actually be spending those $16 million they just raised, those are not available to pay for anything besides what has already been budgeted. They would have to raise $32 million to pay for those ten minutes.

If you still believe that paying people to maintain Wikipedia is a viable strategy, consider the wider implications. Why would anyone volunteer to work for Wikipedia if Wikimedia is willing to pay at least some people for the exact same work?

I’m willing to bet that on average an article gets more attention per year than ten minutes. Wikipedia couldn’t survive if all that volunteer work would disappear.

Why would you spend an equal amount of time on each article, that's insane?!?

...and funnily enough the root of the problem, if Wikipedia could have a rating scale instead of the binary "accepted/deleted" then everyone could be happy. In such a system you could browse only reviewed, fact-checked, vetted, editted, adminned, wp:blergh articles, and have something that looks a lot like a real encyclopedia. Or you could browse at the EVERTHING setting, and read more about obscure pokemon references than you could ever want, or you could browse at any setting inbetween and get the level you want.

It's a false dichotomy that the choice is between either a well-edited encyclopedia or un-edited fandom crap. You can have both at the same time.

Why should Wikipedia be at all involved with hosting content that isn't up to their standards? The EVERYTHING setting is the rest of the web.

c'mon so when do you draw the line?