[WikiEN-l] a valid criticism

Fri Oct 7 04:41:26 UTC 2005

On 10/7/05, Stan Shebs <shebs at apple.com> wrote:
> Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
> 2. We need a way to discourage well-meaning but less-able editors
> from crumbling good articles. On my watchlist I see a lot of editors
> (some logins, some anons) adding nonsequiturs or redundancies,
> randomly rearranging text, adding useless templates en masse, etc.
> They're not vandalism, but they're not improvements either, and
> most of them I just let slide by because they're stylistic rather
> than factual, and it's disheartening to argue with people about
> style over and over. A vicious circle though, because if I feel
> like an article is inexorably going downhill, I'm less and less
> motivated to try to halt the slide. Not quite the same as article
> rating, it seems more like we want articles to gradually get harder
> to edit as they gradually get better.

This is a great point by Stan, and something Wikipedia has to figure
out. At least for English WP, it's no longer predominantly growth
mode; it has entered an important maintenance-heavy mode.

We'd like to think that it's inevitable we'll asymptotically approach
high quality, as Tony defended with [[Eventualism]]. But I think it's
too simplistc. As Stan observed, many articles have been or are
sliding backwards, and unfortunately the techniques to prevent the
regression are generally frowned upon - abrupt rejections of changes
from newbies, repeated reverts, protecting articles.

As we've moved from growth to maintaining the core set of articles
that will be in "1.0", have we appropriately changed our expectations
about community policies to get there?

-User:Fuzheado