[WikiEN-l] Improve quality by reviewing all new articles

Fri Dec 16 14:16:28 UTC 2005

Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> You're right in theory, but in practice I don't think new articles are
> coming in fast enough that there are some that no one looks at at all.
>  Someone *did* look at the Seigenthaler article, it's just that the
> mistakes were subtle enough to not be obvious.

I think the mistakes were blatantly obvious and if the person who wikied
the article had had enough time, the article would have been:
-tagged as a stub
-placed into a category
-edited down to uncontroversial claims

Any good editor _with enough time_ who looks at an article about a
living person which makes claims as transparently outlandish as these
will know to remove those claims and insist on a source.  It would have
taken 15 seconds of googling to see that the claims were in no way
supported by any obvious source.

>  I don't know if it
> contained any references or not, but it certainly could have, just not
> references for every single fact. 

If you don't know if it contained references or not (it didn't, it was
just a short series of spectacularly wrong fabrications), then why do
you feel qualified to say that "the mistakes were subtle enough to not
be obvious."

This would not have been a news story around the world if the mistakes
were subtle.  Subtle mistakes are possible in every medium.  The problem
here, and no one should be complacent about this in any way, shape or
form, is that this article was spectacularly jaw-droppingly wrong, and
sat on the site for 4 months without us noticing it.

> But this proposal was about "basic
> quality standards", standards which the Seigenthaler article
> apparently met (I haven't actually seen it, I'm going by the
> statements of you, Seigenthaler, and others, here).

The Seigenthaler article didn't pass _any_ basic quality standards.

--Jimbo