Andrew Lih wrote:
On 10/7/05, Stan Shebs <shebs(a)apple.com> 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.
I know this is lame, but I just want to say "me too". Stan's point is
great.
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?
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