[WikiEN-l] Critics & weak articles

Wed Apr 20 13:16:57 UTC 2005

> I wouldn't lose sleep over critics "having a field day" on 
> any particular weak article. Sad to say, if people really 
> want to find problematic material in Wikipedia, then they 
> won't have to look very hard, regardless of the quality of 
> any individual article like [[Opus Dei]]. Wikipedia is, 
> effectively, permanently "under construction" -- although the 
> increasingly large set of core articles is becoming pretty 
> solid, it's always going to be easy to find an 
> embarrasingly-naff entry somewhere. 

This is like the people who test "machine translation" by tossing odd
phrases it at, until they find some idiom that trips it up:

* "blood, sweat and tears" into Russian (and back) produces something
like "bleeding, bile and body water"

Then, like the vultures they are, they pounce: "See? It's inaccurate?"

Remember, these are the same journalists who play gotcha with presidents
they don't like (see [[Bushisms]]). If you look hard enough, you can
always find some embarassing phrase or incident, to help you make your
target look bad (so you can discredit him).

This is the sort of thing that drove away Larry Sanger (in part): lack
of respect for accomplishment, diligence and solid scholarship. You try
to find some small thing to pick on, and then (illegitimately) imply
that it's representative of the whole. (I started to write an article on
[[damaging quotation]]s one time.)

To make Wikipedia really solid, SOMEBODY has to start verifying and
endorsing Article Versions. I still credit Larry Sanger as the
originator of the "sifter project", and I eagerly wait integration of
Magnus's software updates.

We need to be able to identify stable versions of articles - especially
important articles. I want to see tags such as:

* copy-edited by Vicki R.
* vandalism-patrolled by maveric149
* NPOV-checked by Anthere

Sure, multiple people can add their endorsements. I don't want to see a
"tag war" start, where one person adds the NPOV-dispute tag, and another
removes it. If someone *I* respect says the article passes or fails the
NPOV test, then that's all I care about. If someone *you* respect tags
it a certain way, that's all *you* care about.

Uncle Ed