A media barrage: if we stay the course, it's not whether, but when. If we stay the course, however, this will happen within the next year or two. It's not a matter of whether; it's a matter of when. This could happen all at once, too, which is the thing I'm concerned about. Next summer, for example, we might break 50,000 articles, and be going gangbusters. We might decide to do a press release (we've never done one!), and Time (or whatever) might decide to write up a big hyped-up article about it, and that might lead to evening broadcast news coverage, Wall Street Journal analysts mentioning it as the next big thing, interviews, the works. I think it would be a mistake to dismiss this possibility.
The accompanying invasion of newbies. Now, if that happened, of course it would be mainly wonderful and fantastic. What worries me is that, overnight, most of the people working on Wikipedia, at that stage, would be newbies. Suppose there were, say, 200 people on average working on Wikipedia. (Presently, it's somewhat less than that.) Then suppose that, over a period of two weeks, that number were instantly increased by a factor of ten, or a hundred: 2,000, or 20,000. In that case, it's possible that the average newbie in this generation of contributors would be of the way-too-clueless variety, and that a significant minority would be malicious. This could be a significant threat to the integrity and credibility of the project. -- Let me try to put this worry slightly differently. In the past, Slashdottings and my K5 article have resulted in a lot of dross, which in my opinion we're still recovering from. We just haven't been able to keep up with it. If we were suddenly to be invaded with, say, fifty times that traffic, it could be a major disaster. The face of Wikipedia could change overnight, and for the worse. We've got to be prepared.
The Wikipedia "Militia." In case of a media-induced invasion of newbies, it would be instantly, but probably temporarily, important that we have old hands (you know who you are) working constantly doing [Wikipedia weeding]. Not of each others' stuff--of the particularly clueless newbies' stuff. I think it would help if we had something akin to a (humorous) "militia," where, when "war" (i.e., the aforementioned media-induced invasion of newbies) breaks out, the "troops" are called out to, er, nicely assimilate and teach the "invaders." To declare yourself a member of the "Wikipedia Militia" is to declare that, when asked, you are committed to doing unusual amounts of Wikipedia weeding, focusing particularly on the contributions of the more "clueless" of the newbies, as well as just plain malicious people.
Calling out the militia. I am going to put my name on the following list of militia members. I encourage you to do the same. If we are "invaded" as a result of massive amounts of news coverage, I will "call out the militia," meaning that I will post an announcement on Wikipedia-L (all militia members should be subscribed) as well as on Wikipedia Announcements, and that will be your cue to "do your duty," namely, do some heavy weeding on the Recent Changes page and on a (hopefully automatically-generated) list of new article topics recently added. I will also try to make a point of declaring that the "invasion" is over (but, of course, as people are still learning, we should still be on "heightened alert").
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