Jimmy Wales wrote:
Fastfission wrote:
But clearly "obscurity" is not the
factor which determines a good or
bad article. Plenty of articles on obscure people are very good and
plenty articles on very simple things can be quite bad. But still, he
did not, of course, give any rationale for these two articles except
that they exemplify the fact that Wikipedia is edited by amateurs and
sometimes has spotty content. So what?
It disappoints me to hear a Wikipedian take this attitude towards
quality. "So what?" So -- we're trying to be better than this, that's
what.
There can be many intonations on "So what?" that cannot be adequately
represented. Some are indeed offensive. I would prefer to nassume good
faith on this.
But
nobody's making excuses here. I'm just saying that you will always
be able to find sore spots if you want to. If you believe in the
Wikipedia way, what you do is try to fix them or call them to the
attention to others. If you don't, then you write pissy articles about
them.
I don't think this is what our general response to this sort of
complaint should be. I think our response should be: hey, you know
what, he's right! These articles ought to be pretty decent, but they
aren't. Why? What can we do to improve?
If we study it up one side and down the other and conclude that there is
nothing to be done about it, then fine. But we should not just accept
the current state of affairs if there are sensible proposals for
improvement.
I haven't read the two articles in question; perhaps it's better that I
don't. I don't expect anything to be a perfect article, but we do have
some that come damn close. The entire project has perhaps become
successful because of and despite its imperfections. If *anyone*
complains about a particular article the {{sofixit}} comeback is always
available; if you complain about an article you must have some idea
about what needs to be done.
We would all like better production from the crop of articles in our
collective farm.. We do have some Stakhanovs among us, but it would be
wrong to expect as much output from the rest of the volunteers.
We're not
making software, here -- just because some parts of it are
spotty doesn't mean the entire package won't work. In that way we're a
lot less restrained than the open source software projects and can
afford to have a philosophy of eventualism.
I don't have a problem with eventualism -- but 'eventualism' is not
the
same as saying "so what?" to quality problems.
Some of the best practices that inspired the growth of Wikipedia do not
scale well at all. We all believe in the ideal that the articles should
improve in quality. But is the poison pill of impatient perfectionism
the appropriate prescription, or does it leave us drugged out in
illusions that we are accomplishing something? We will always have
articles that can best be described as a piece of shit, and those are
far more apparent in an environment filled superior work. Sometimes if
the duchess sees the problem, and the hired help is not immediately
available she may just have to get down on her hands and knees to scrub
the bathroom floor.
Quality is a concern for all of us. However, when quality becomes a
mantra it can easily bring us to a tipping point where that urge
overwhelms the values that were responsible for the growth.
Ec