[WikiEN-l] Featured article deterioration

Tue Apr 11 10:58:07 UTC 2006

Ben Greenberg wrote:
> Its simply naive to say that infinite edits means an infinitely good 
> article.  If you dont believe that bad, non-vandalism edits take their toll 
> on articles, I invite you to look at the Featured article review.  So many 
> articles are ruined by people who simply aren't good at writing prose, and 
> who enjoy adding useless factoids.  Articles quite often get worse-- if your 
> idealism has you believing otherwise, please look at this:
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hip_hop_music&diff=41510779&oldid=36727078
> 
> This should be a big wakeup call to anyone who thinks that the pure wiki 
> system allows articles to get better indefinitely.  Unless we do something 
> about it, wikipedia will simply be a place where articles get great then 
> start to deteriorate.  I'm not suggesting stable versions, but surely... 
> something needs to be done.
> 
> 

I tend to agree. One email that I remember handling on OTRS was someone
saying that they'd accidentally blanked one section of an article and
severely shortened another; the blanking had gone unnoticed for three
weeks before I fixed it.

-- 
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
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