On 4/10/06, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca> wrote:
Deterioration might not be so bad. In evolutionary
optimization (for
example via genetic algorithms) a concept that's often mentioned is the
"fitness landscape", a graph showing the relative fitness of all
possible solutions to a particular problem. The landscape for most
I'm familiar with this problem, but do you know of any detailed (if
not particularly formal) analysis to see if it applies to Wikipedia,
or even wiki editing in general? Not infrequently you hear people say
"this article is a mess, nothing short of rewriting is required here".
But I'm not convinced. Is it not possible, given an article in state
T0, where state Tp is perfection, find small, realistic changes T1, T2
etc?
reach. For example, new material might be added
covering some aspect of
the article's topic that wasn't covered previously, but the new material
has bad grammar and sparse citations and is "bad" enough to knock the
article off of Featured status. The best approach in this case is not to
just revert to the old version, but rather clean up the new material to
result in an even better article than it was before.
In this particular instance, it seems that you could add *some* of the
new material in a small enough block that the lack of citations or
poor copyediting does not knock the article off its FA perch. Then,
when that material has been brought up to scratch, add the next batch.
Wholesale additions of poor quality material are generally quite
destabilising for an article, and tend to piss off existing editors,
who wonder when it will all stop...
Steve