[WikiEN-l] Dartmouth follies

Wed Aug 25 16:32:30 UTC 2004

Andrew Lih wrote:

>But I'd like to offer another interpretation - there is no confidence
>these suspicious edits will be found or caught later. And that can bug
>certain types of people. Of all the mechanisms Wikipedia has for
>tracking changes and edits, perhaps the weakest is how to allow new
>entires to linger for a specified period and grow, and then come back
>to evaluate later. For many, "check it later" means "check it never."
>  
>
I think this is definitely true, and not just because people misperceive 
that they have to act now.  Things get caught on recent changes and new 
articles, but if they don't get caught there, they often essentially 
never get caught.  When using the "random pages" feature (as I do quite 
a bit), I've run into complete junk, sometimes outright vandalism (like 
"bob is gay") that has been there since _2002_.

Cleanup is supposed to address some of this problem, but I'm not 
qualified to say whether it's worked or not.

-Mark