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

Fri Dec 16 14:27:44 UTC 2005

On 12/16/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> >  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."
>
If the mistakes were obvious, the edit patroller who edited the
article would have caught them.

I also read the USA Today article, and the paragraphs that were quoted
were not obvious mistakes.  "John Seigenthaler Sr. was the assistant
to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early 1960's. For a brief
time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy
assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever
proven."  "John Seigenthaler moved to the Soviet Union in 1971, and
returned to the United States in 1984," Wikipedia said. "He started
one of the country's largest public relations firms shortly
thereafter."

None of those mistakes are obvious.  Now maybe there were others which
were more glaring and Seigenthaler just decided not to mention them. 
But I doubt 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

The original post said this: "Note that I didn't check whether the
content was *accurate*, merely whether it was organised, formatted etc
in accordance with Wikipedia standards."

The proposal was specifically *not* about accuracy.

Anthony