[WikiEN-l] Critics & weak articles

Tue Apr 26 19:43:21 UTC 2005

Bryan Derksen wrote:

> Personally, all I really want out of a sifter-type process is "this 
> has been checked and is not blatantly vandalized or currently an 
> active battleground, and the spelling looks okay to me." IMO a sifter 
> like this would take a lot of stress off of editors who, rightly or 
> wrongly, feel the need to keep a constant watch over articles and 
> "fix" them instantly when problems crop up. It would also allow us to 
> feel comfortable stamping ten thousand CDs without the fear that the 
> database dump was taken at the exact moment a vandal stuck in 
> something dreadful that is now immortalized in dimpled aluminium. All 
> the standard Wikipedia disclaimers should still apply.
>
> Once we have that, then maybe we can start looking at ways to produce 
> an even more rigorously proofed versions that includes fact checking. 
> I'm not in a hurry. :)

This sounds like exactly the right approach to me.  What's more, it fits 
nicely with the incremental-improvement process we've used so far.  
Writing top-quality articles from scratch a la Nupedia turned out to be 
fairly hard, but incrementally improving articles has worked quite 
well.  Incrementally verifying articles might likewise have some 
advantages over trying to make a leap from "this could be anything, 
including random vandalism" to "this has been verified by experts in the 
field as the Perfect Article".  There's always a risk of *too* much 
complication, but a few simple levels of verification, starting with 
"this revision is not vandalized, not in the midst of an edit war, and 
not obviously glaringly bad", would be nice.

-Mark