QUOTE(Peter Damian @ Sat 5th February 2011, 2:16am)
Ok, one thing I would do if I were the dictator of Wikipedia - and this is pretty limited and essentially reflects my parochial interests - is go through all the Economics related articles and delete about 80% to 90% of them and say "ok Wikipedia monkeys, this whole "gradual improvement" "piece by piece" "one edit at a time" did not converge to anything but garbage last time around. Maybe we'll get luckier next round so let's start from scratch".
And we're not talking stubs or limited interest topics here but a lot of major subjects and articles which 1. were written as total crap initially and the whole institutional inertia of Wikipedia has made it impossible to overcome that low starting point and 2. have accumulated an insane amount of "on the one hand on the other hand" "some people think this some people think that" "this idea is criticized by some while the criticism is criticized by others and then the criticism of the criticism is criticized yet again but this is also controversial" "we need to include every Joe Schmoe's ideas about how the economy works" cruft.
I'd do a similar thing for a lot of articles on Eastern European topics (60% to 70% of anything to do with Polish-German history) though there there are more "islands" of high quality work.
This post has been edited by radek: 
If you owned Wikipedia, what would you do with it
Peter Damian If you owned Wikipedia 
