Lets not delude ourselves. We have a long way to go. I was just looking at some old EB articles the other day; Guerrilla [warfare], written by .......... T. E. Lawrence. And Space-time, written by .......... Albert Einstein. EB has literally tens of thousands of superb, first rate articles written by the world's leading experts and polished by an editorial staff. Yet we enjoy make fun of a handful of embarrassing errors or shortcomings that have. Conversely, Wikipedia has literally thens of thousands of piles of festering crap, a huge amount of unverified, uncited information and only a handful of first rate articles. We've been the media's little darling for a long time, not because we are great, but because Wikipedia works _at all_. The media honeymoon won't last forever. Article validation might help some, but we also need a check valve to keep the good stuff and reject the bad. Experts and great writers aren't going to stick around and watch their work perpetually degraded. Lest I sound too harsh, remember that the OED, also written with the help of volunteers, took over fifty years to fully publish.

But as for the lady who gave the zero, we need to find her e-mail address so we can ask her what should be added to the Haute Coutre article. On 10/28/05, charles matthews <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote:

Well, I hope it doesn't take another 45 years to sift through and organise all our submissions :) But we are going to have to adapt or we'll be relpaced. Early in the project any information coming in was good (a poorly written article being better than no article, usually). As articles mature there will be a point where they stop improving, on average, by random edits. I'm not a fan of page freezing, I'd prefer some kind or released vs working version, plus a mechanism for rev rolling (only for 'released' articles). Or any other check-valve that obstructs the random degeneration while still allowing constant improvement.

Puddl Duk wrote organise all our submissions :) It might take a generation before WP's impact can properly be assessed. There are simple scenarios in which WP is replaced within 6 months. Some billionaire throws $100 million at cloning the content and putting 50 developers on a crash project to upgrade (streaming video, segmentation of pages, parental filtering, automatic inference to a stable page version, pro major topic editors, all the gimmicks you'd come up with). We all go there to edit. But that's a huge win as long as it's still GDFL, and run by the community. (Well, the management side miight be pants, in which case we all come back to WP.) 'Being replaced' is kind of a tribute, not a worry. Charles

Puddl Duk wrote: I'd say even the "good" Britannica articles are, with a very few exceptions, quite bad when it comes to having a neutral point of view. 1911 EB in particular does not even pretend to be neutral, and makes quite unsupported judgments with astonishing frequency, claiming e.g. that a particular philosophical viewpoint is "wrong" (even if it's widely accepted), or that a particular author's work is "overrated", and so on. The current edition is certainly much better than 1911, but it still leaves much to be desired. -Mark

Stan Shebs wrote: I mostly agree, although I think it may be going a bit too far to say that it's really our invention. As far as I can tell, most encyclopedias came around to that ideal before Wikipedia was founded. Whether or not they've achieved it successfully is quite another story---I think the Wikipedia process is much better at enforcing NPOV than the traditional encyclopedia-writing process. Since at least post-WW2, though, most encyclopedias would claim that their goal is unbiased presentation of information, not presentation of an Anglo-American or otherwise skewed viewpoint. In fact many have hired the equivalent of "diversity consultants" to make sure that their coverage of non-Western people is at the very least not offensive. It's also typically the stated goal of textbooks, academic survey papers, and other such "overviews" to present a neutral view of a subject (again with mixed results). In a certain sense this may be even better than if we had completely invented NPOV---we're the realization of a goal nearly everyone else already agrees is the right one. -Mark

On 10/30/05, Tom Cadden <thomcadden(a)yahoo.ie> wrote: Please name a few of these articles in serious decay. I am very interested in seeing several examples of this. So far, all I've seen is vague affirmations that this indeed is happening. I don't doubt that it has happened, but I'd like to have a look to better understand the trouble. -- Michael Turley User:Unfocused

That is a very sad situation, and unfortunately not uncommon. While we have a policy of "anyone can edit" I don't think things will change much, unless we have a "stable version" or similar idea. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Puddl Duk" <puddlduk(a)gmail.com> To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l(a)Wikipedia.org> Sent: Monday, October 31, 2005 6:12 PM Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Slipping quality as Wikipedia gets bigger (formerlyCan you trust Wikipedia?)

Bryan Derksen wrote: Well, as the author of said feature, I've been asking for a long time what's the holdup. I'm fairly certain it is, at the very least, ready for the planned test phase. I keep asking people what should be fixed, but so far (that is, in the last few month) noone could tell me the reason it remains turned off. If parts of it are broken or not up to MediaWiki standard or Evil(tm) in some other important way, please, PLEASE tell me so I can fix it. Should I backport it from CVS HEAD to some other branch? Which one? Anything! So far, I've been mostly ignored. Magnus

On 10/30/05, Tom Cadden <thomcadden(a)yahoo.ie> wrote: I rarely edit in my area of expertise for just this reason, too disturbing. We should be doing everything we can to encourage people who create high quality work. These people often aren't the kind who come to Wikipedia for interaction and socializing. They often contrast to the large numbers in our community who *do* interact a lot. Case in point, DrBob is a good editor. He's an expert on optics, writes well, makes great illustrations and has been a contributer for over FOUR years. He has about 2000 edits, actually more - some were lost in software changes long ago. He takes an occasional wikibreak of several months every year. His admin nomination is being torpedoed because he "doesn't interact enough", despite the fact that he has been a volunteer on the wikipedia reference desks for over two years. Not only does he occasionally seek out interaction, but he is good at it. This is the most idiotic no vote I've ever seen at RFA. Ability and desire to interact a lot will certainly help in some areas of wikipedia, administrator or not, but not the main administrative duties- vandalism revert, speedy deletes, copyvio cleanup and IP blocking. Remeber, this is not a person with no interaction, quite the opposite; this is an editor who seeks interaction from time in the communites public forms. Admin's are NOT mediators, or mothers, or babysitters. The vast majority of their work doesn't require much interaction. If a guy has chosen not to interact on the the talk pages of politically charged middleast related articles in the last four years (where special interaction skills might help) then giving him admin power is not likely to change this. Furthermore, we need a diverse goup of adminstrators and users alike. Requiring a ton of interaction for administratorship will cut out, in one fell swoop, all the quiet, hard working people who are here to write an encyclopedia, silently toiling behind the scenes. I think people like these are currently some of the very best admins. And I sometimes think that reserves silence and wisdome go hand in hand.

Matt Brown wrote: I was seriously considering becoming an admin, but after a quick view of RFA, I decided it wasn't worth that. - Jareth

On 11/3/05, charles matthews <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote: But what is a good admin? As an admin you are going to have people hate you. You are going to have situations where you are under pressure. If you can't handle that perhaps you are better off specaliseing in adding content. -- geni

Of course you are, but does that mean intentionally putting oneself in the line of fire? I think that the amount of work I do cleaning backlogs could also be helpful in the admin realm; its not about getting a rollback button -- I can do that anyways. I'm concerned though, should I go for adminship, the nit-picking (as I see it) that currently goes on would do a lot to sour me against the entire project; it can really take the wind out of your sails. I work in a similar environment -- we don't have a manager, team members nominate themselves for tasks. If we had the same level of bickering going on we'd never get a thing done and we'd create a lot of mistrust. Its not quite the same in a large environment like Wikipedia, but its counterproductive none the less. There's a knack and a bit of tact necessary to deliver good constructive criticism and those skills are currently lacking as a whole in the RFA process. --Jareth

I want to read and write an encyclopedia in a professional atmosphere. The procedure for selecting representitives of the project should not allow children and their antics to become the basis of its decisions. Open votes are unproductive in this case. Jack (Sam Spade)

I must be a *great* admin, then. ;-) Jay.

"Puddl Duk" wrote takes all types. True. I would say the point is this, though: the good admin, in saying 'I speak for the community' or 'I act for the community', carries conviction. Because that's backed up with enough experience and understanding of the actual requirements for the work that goes on, not just legal forms. Charles

On 11/2/05, Michelle <jareth(a)crimsonblade.net> wrote: Exactly the result I feared, and I'm sure you're not the only one who's decided that. Heck, I might have decided not to go for adminship in the current climate. -Matt (User:Morven)

On 04/11/05, Wikiacc <wikiacc(a)gmail.com> wrote: I was quite surprised how smoothly mine went... -- - Andrew Gray 666th admin on en.wiki. This may indicate something. andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

Ok already, obviously the process works ''sometimes''. The problem is that it often does not work. We cannot continue to allow random people to harass and blackball qualified candidates. The process is unrewarding, and discourages contributions. Nuff said. ~~~~ On 11/4/05, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On 04/11/05, Michelle <jareth(a)crimsonblade.net> wrote: Yeah. There's ten to twenty at a time; if one is contentious, you remember that and not the nineteen others. Which suggests that even 5-10% of RFAs being messy is enough to make the process look a lot worse than it is... -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

smoothly. Jay.