User:RandomP/Wikizoo
This is a silly essay. Please don't hold it against me.
Wikipedia is like a zoo.
People go to a zoo to look at animals, and people go to Wikipedia to look at articles. Zoo visitors will have a good time if the animals are healthy and happy, but they will also have a good time if the animals just look healthy and happy — that elephant might be so lively only because it's constipated, and that giraffe might be sad over his inability to find a long-necked girlfriend. From the point of view of the zoo staff, of course, whether visitors have a good time always comes after the health and happiness of the animals; in fact, much of a zoo isn't open to visitors at all: it's much more complicated to keep a zebra happy and healthy than merely putting it in an enclosure and showing it to people. While the visitors might stay with an animal for a minute or an hour, it's the zoo staff who have to be available for overnight stays with a sick donkey or work out how best to find a soul—and species—mate for the giraffe. All this happens unbeknownst to the visitors, and the first they might know of the staff's tireless efforts is when a giraffe baby is born two years later[1].
The Wikipedia zoo, of course, has no (or very few) "no access!" signs: every visitor is welcome to jump over the fence and play with the guinea pigs[2].
As with a zoo animal, a visitor cannot know that a Wikipedia article is healthy just by looking at it for a minute[3]; only by looking at its history and how it is being treated (and by whom) can one gain confidence that it will grow and prosper, and one day be the ancestor of many happy articles in the other wikis. That history isn't always pretty: Wikipedia's history function preserves in all detail every elephant enema and newborn giraffe's first stumbling step.
And like a good zoo, Wikipedia isn't (just) about having good articles right now: it's about creating an environment where good articles procreate as if by magic (though an extra acacia ration for the giraffes might be required after a particularly intense night of that), and it's about the articles we had as much as about those currently visible. The whole Wikipedia database, which preserves many gems that at the time seemed mere asides to a discussion about something else entirely, and many drafts of articles that ended up being written differently, is the zoo: the articles are merely snapshots of the animals, and quite a few of them are hiding in the bushes (or engaged in an activity altogether unappetizing) at any given point. Don't worry too much if all you see in the snapshot is half an elephant's backside: the elephant's still there, and, if we treat it right, might well be taking a photogenic mudbath a week or two from now.