User:Kmweber/What Wikipedia Is

What Wikipedia ultimately is and is not is necessarily constrained by what a wiki can and cannot do. To discover this, we must ask ourselves: what is the essence of a wiki--what are the fundamental aspects that distinguish a wiki from a normal website?

On a normal website, I can visit it and read the content of pages; I can do that on a wiki equally well. On a normal website, I cannot modify the content of pages myself; on a wiki, I definitely can. This, clearly, is the essential difference between a wiki and a normal website; and equally clearly, it is a difference of content production rather than content publishing. Indeed, this mode of content production is a wiki's greatest strength, and the method by which that takes place means that a wiki has a considerable weakness in publishing content. Open editing means that anyone who has information to contribute can easily do so; but it also means that anyone who wants to cause trouble can do so just as easily. Given enough eyeballs, it's possible to keep the aggregate amount of time a wiki page contains questionable content to a minimum, so that production work can progress; but given open editing (without which there's no point in introducing the overhead of a wiki) it is impossible to make sure that any given article does not contain questionable or inaccurate content at any given point in time, so a wiki utterly fails as a medium of content distribution.

Indeed, on Wikipedia, content is released under a free license for very specific reasons. First, it allows anyone to modify the work of anyone else, thus enabling the wiki to fulfill its role as a content production mechanism, for which it is uniquely suited. Second, it allows third parties to handle the work of publishing content, separating the wheat from the chaff, and so fill in the role that wikis really aren't suited for.

What this means is that we shouldn't be really too concerned about making sure articles in Mainspace meet some minimum level of quality or completeness. We don't need some other place to work on articles and bring them up to par; Mainspace is where we work on articles and bring them up to par. The purpose of the Mainspace is to serve as the workshop for articles, and not as the publishing mechanism for articles—that is the role of third parties. Maybe it's desirable to have sources for articles in the end, but that doesn't mean we have to have them right now. Publishers who don't want to publish unverified content can simply choose to exclude it from their releases. But in the meantime, we keep our works in progress around so that someone, sometime—and it may be ten, twenty, thirty, or a hundred years on down the road—can complete them, building on the work of others. Deleting them just forces that person to start from scratch.