"It is my intention that we aim at Britannica-or-better quality, period, free or non-free." Geez, watch what you say. Before I noticed who made the statement I took it to mean that you don't care if we're free or non-free. Anthony

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Stan Shebs wrote: I've actually had some luck with this. If someone makes an edit that doesn't hurt anything, but doesn't add anything either, I simply revert with the edit summary "rv: not an improvement". This seems to send a message to people that edits need to be constructive and have a plan behind them. Just moving stuff around isn't good for the Wiki, and a solitary edit like this could seem to have no effect, but in the aggregate they can make for a ridiculously disorganized article that is not at all a pleasure to read. - - Ryan

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Michael Turley wrote: If you want to do that, you are welcome to. My intention was to give him an idea on how to deal with this problem, not to lecture him on manners. - - Ryan

That's an incredibly hostile way of editing. What happens when someone thinks that your "rv. not an improvement" is "not an improvement"? -- mvh Björn

On 10/7/05, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney(a)gmail.com> wrote: Actually, there IS much you can do. Start by leaving a talk page post explaining just what you think is wrong with the other person's edits each time you use your "rv: not an improvement" message. That's all it takes. You can do a lot with very little effort. Your way is hostile not because it isn't part of the common understanding, it's hostile because it criticizes other editors and makes no attempt to be non-hostile. It also gives no impression of what you find wrong with someone else's good faith edit. I sincerely hope your current method NEVER becomes part of the common understanding. -- Michael Turley User:Unfocused

Ryan Delaney wrote: Heh, that's tougher than I've generally been willing to be. Seems all too easy to trigger edit wars and accusations of newbie-biting, but softening it by explaining the rationale takes time away from content improvement. Explanations are worth the trouble if the person is going to be a long-term contributor, but not if they're one of the "two-day wonders" that are active for only a short time. Another one of my hesitations in reverting is that oftentimes a good edit, say a spelling fix, is intermixed with more ambitious tinkering, as the editor starts with the obvious fix and then is emboldened to do more. Then it gets time-consuming to undo only part of an edit. This circles back to the back to the shortage of editors too; while it can be engaging to do stylistic fixup, vandalism patrol, etc, I find that it can easily suck up my entire available WP time, leaving no cycles for contributing in the areas where I have unique expertise. I see that happening with other editors too. WP being a volunteer organization, people will always work on what they want to work on, and many SMEs enjoy working outside their field, but if your goal is to build the best possible encyclopedia, you want your Nobel laureates to write about their research, not to feel like they have to mop floors or scrape gum off the undersides of desks because otherwise it won't get done. Stan

Andrew Lih wrote: I know this is lame, but I just want to say "me too". Stan's point is great. I think that's exactly the right conversation for us to be having. I'm a big fan of eventualism. But Bill Gates and Jane Fonda are not new articles, nor are they difficult or obscure subjects. Nor are the problems I'm _currently_ concerned about with these articles problems resulting from a lack of knowledge. They are stylistic problems which are pretty awful. --jimbo

Tony Sidaway wrote: I don't disagree with you, but it occurs to me that this is at least roughly a testable hypothesis. Of course, right now, there's no real need for a group decision to do this. It's perfectly acceptable (if a bit bold) to dig back six months into the past and resurrect an older version of an article before it went downhill. "Something went badly off track back there, so I resurrected the old article and seek help in incorporating any positive changes from intervening versions in a way that doesn't make the article read like chopped liver" sounds like a great thing to write on the talk page. I agree completely. --Jimbo

Tony Sidaway wrote: Another factor is the tension between information and style. On the one hand we want to have lots of accurate information, on the other hand we want to have well-written, readable articles, and those two things aren't easy to bring in agreement. If you add facts, you'll likely ruin the style, and if you improve the style, you'll likely remove information. In popular articles, people care more about information, so the style is going to suffer. What can be done about that? Reorganizing the facts while being careful not to remove any. And this is really hard, because you need to be familiar with all of the facts before you can successfully reorganize them, or you'll distort them. Chris [[User:Chl]]

Fastfission wrote: Yes, but these are not exactly obscure people. If he went and found an article on an obscure 13th century poet which was crap, I would be not quite as bothered. But Jane Fonda? Bill Gates? These entries could be contentious, heavily edited, prone to vandalism, occassionally biased, etc., and I would be happier than I am right now. What I'm unhappy about is *bad writing*. Well, I don't agree. It is my intention that we be valued for completeness and coherency and "brilliant prose" *as well as* for being freely licensed, with magnificent breadth and speed and usefulness, etc. --Jimbo

Fastfission wrote: 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. 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 don't have a problem with eventualism -- but 'eventualism' is not the same as saying "so what?" to quality problems. --Jimbo

Delirium wrote: *nod* Ok, I see your point. What I wonder is if we could identify a particular class of articles and discover that they tend to be bad in a particular way and then do something about it. In the case in hand, we have "Bill Gates" and "Jane Fonda" -- they are similar in that they are both living famous Americans who are controversial. The problems with the articles are similar in that the problem isn't so much bias or lack of factual accuracy, as it is bad writing. Are the biographies of other living famous Americans who are controversial similarly godawful? Here's a test: Bill Clinton, Michael Moore, Sean Penn, Ann Coulter I wonder how those are, and I'll be studying them on the plane home tomorrow.... /me goes to download and save. --Jimbo

On Sunday, October 9, 2005, at 09:40 AM, Delirium wrote: They've always been bad I think, LOL :). Thanks, Ryan [[User:RN]] at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:RN Ryan Norton at wxforum: http://wxforum.org

On 10/8/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote: Well, I'm all for aspiration, but I think in practice we cannot honestly suspect that people will not be able to find spotty articles when they want to. Even in publications with professionally trained, full-time editors this is a major problem (I say this as someone who in a previous life worked in a number of publishing and fact-checking jobs). In a situation where one is relying upon the volunteer and usually amateur labor of thousands of editors... it seems unavoidable. But of course that is just my gut sense of it. I don't mean this to sound pessimistic. I think Wikipedia will always have a great many articles of very high quality. But I also think it will also have a great many articles of poor quality. This in no means should sound either discouraging or discouraged. I just think it's a fact of how a project of this sort will work in practice and I think it will be a constant tension. But let's not forget that tensions can be productive! The reason many editors (myself being one of them) got hooked on Wikipedia in the first place was discovering a sub-par article on something they knew about and, instead of writing off the whole idea, said "I can fix this!" and just never stopped. Well, I admit to making two major assumptions: 1. that the reason there will be spotty places like this is because of the wiki model itself and 2. that the wiki model has many other benefits and I wouldn't want to change it very much. You might be right in questioning my assumptions in the first case -- that this isn't something inherent to the model. It may of course be that my version of "the wiki model" is different than yours but I suspect it is not that different. Okay, I agree with that. My "so what?" was only to the fact that Wikipedia sometimes has spotty content. I do somewhat suspect this is going to be inherent to the project -- at any given moment, there might be things which need work. But I could be very wrong on that, of course, and hopefully I am! I don't think there's a massive "quality" problem that isn't to be expected from a system of this sort. I think the fact that there is some very high-quality work is proof enough that this system doesn't *necessarily* lead to poor or spotty content, which is what most of these critics generally seem to be implying. It would be interesting, as a fact-finding exercise, for someone to sit down with the histories of these two articles as well as the histories of two featured articles and look at what the patterns of editing were and see if any generalizable conclusions could be drawn. I'm not sure if it would give any actionable policy, but could at least reduce the armchair philosophizing (which I'm of course always happy to take part in, being somewhat of a pedant). FF