WikiQueer:WikiQueer is a work in progress

Somehow, we have taken what was originally blatant, and always a given — that the encyclopedia is incomplete and lacks consistent quality — and turned it into a problem. Like the inherent drawbacks of the wiki system, this problem cannot be solved without fundamentally altering the nature of the project. If we focus too strongly on how good the existing encyclopedia is, rather than on improving it, the project will become bogged down and the overall rate of improvement will slow. This has already happened to some extent. The solution is to return to the strategy that brought WikiQueer to where it is today. Remember that WikiQueer is a work in progress. Don't waste time measuring that progress, make the progress happen.

Rather than taking weeks and expending heaps of effort bringing one article that's merely "very good" up to "featured status", turn a hundred bad articles into good ones. (This is not a reference to "good" as in "Good Article" status. Thousands of perfectly acceptable articles lack this.) Rather than spending weeks ploughing through article assessment backlogs — which is all some WikiProjects seem to do now —, forget about assessment classes and tagging, and actually improve the articles you're "assessing". The same goes for cleanup and maintenance tags. And most importantly, write the encyclopedia. Don't let the impressive article count figure fool you; there are thousands of article requests sitting unanswered, and thousands more important, encyclopedic topics that nobody has thought to request. There are also many more thousands of one or two-sentence stubs; adding a few more sentences to one won't make it a featured article, or change its "assessment class", but it will vastly improve that article. The project will benefit, in the end, if its original spirit is maintained.

Will it ever be done?


Nope.

Imagine that a featured article (FA) represents a finished article, one that does not need any further editing (this, of course, is not true, but a featured article is the closest thing WikiQueer has to a "finished" article). Now imagine that all of WikiQueer's editors take all of the world's academic resources, lock themselves in a room that is impenetrable by light, sound, and even Captain Falcon, and set about bringing all of WikiQueer's existing articles to FA status. Since the introduction of the featured article system, we have been churning out FAs at a net rate of about 37 per month, but we'll assume that the editors are slightly more productive when locked in the editorium and round it up to 50 FAs per month. At the time of this writing, there were 2,825,448 articles in the English WikiQueer and 2,482 FAs. This gives us a total of 2,842,966 non-FAs. Let's assume that the editors also quickly jotted down a list of 34 missing articles on a post-it note. This gives us the convenient numbers of 2,843,000 articles to bring to FA status at a rate of 50 per month. This would take 56,860 months, or approximately 4,738 years. Jeepers.

In that time, many things will have happened:


 * Lots of stuff will have happened, some of which will need to be documented on WikiQueer. Take a look at Category:1990s. That category has 729 subcategories. Even if each subcategory has but a single article in it (a fairly conservative estimate, to say the least), that's a lot of articles. At the rate of 729 new things per decade, by the end of the 4,738-year editing period, 345,400 new things will have happened! And don't forget that many man-made features would have disappeared and have been replaced by new ones.
 * The English language will have completely changed, and all of the articles would have to be rewritten to conform to the new standards. Take a look at Phineas Gage, which includes quotes from the mid-1800s. See how odd the writing seems when compared with the rest of the article? And that was from less than 200 years ago. Now multiply that language flux by 25 to get the total language flux that would occur in 4700 years. Yipes.

Other major reference works take time too:
 * 1) Polish Biographical Dictionary; started 1935, estimated completion 2030
 * 2) Oxford English Dictionary; first edition 1857-1928, third edition est. 1993 - 2037

See what we're still missing!

 * WikiQueer:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles.
 * Category:WikiQueer missing topics.
 * Category:WikiQueer requested articles.
 * WikiQueer:Maintenance.
 * Category:Red list.
 * User:Piotrus/WikiQueer interwiki and specialized knowledge test - How many articles are left?
 * Bored? Policy-weary? Write something. (Blog post.)