From Fertilizer Come Flowers

While test pages and gross inaccuracies should be removed or corrected, surely content of genuine intent is due the opportunity to evolve into quality, even if that quality turns out to be OffTopic and eventually belongs elsewhere. It is common place that crap of "genuine intent" should be promoted in a society. The heart of the matter is that some people just litter the place with "stuff", because they genuinely do not mind disorder. They contend that their "creative disorder" is the substance out of which wiki grows.

But,

The litter is a very strong disincentive for other contributors to sustain the effort needed to produce quality content and the people who just want to clean up after their mess are accused of intolerance. Great content, even decent content, even OffTopic decent content, has never been subject to any controversy on C2 wiki. People who invoke FromFertilizerComeFlowers argument hardly ever pick up their own trash even after they noticed that the flowers don't grow after all. In any representative period of the history of wiki, the level of general noise on this wiki (no matter that you call it "fertilization", "grand project", "search for truth" or other BS) is inversely proportional with the level of quality content produced here that benefits everybody.

On The Other Hand,

This page provides something of a counter. It was a ThreadMess. It will no doubt become thread-messy again as those who miss the threadiness revert to type. And get cleaned again and so on. Each time that happens, there's a good chance a few flowers - maybe even fruit - will come.

CategoryGardeningMetaphor