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

Fri Dec 16 14:51:18 UTC 2005

On 12/16/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> > 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.
>
> That's a spectacularly bad bit of reasoning.  The mistakes *were*
> obvious, and the edit patroller *did not* catch them.  Those are the
> simple facts of the case.  The question we must ask ourselves is: why?
>
> Simply pre-defining "obvious mistakes" as "anything an edit patroller
> catches" in a tautological fashion is absurd and in my opinion mere
> trolling.
>
I'm defining "obvious mistakes" roughly as "a mistake that anyone
looking at something would notice".  If something is obvious, then
someone looking at it would notice it.  I guess I'm presuming that the
edit patroller actually looked at the article.

I really think you need to take a step back here and consider that the
definition of obvious that I was using is quite reasonable.  It might
not be exactly the right definition, and it might not be how you
thought I was using the word.  But it wasn't trolling.

> Imagine this conversation:
>
> Q: "How does wikipedia police new articles?"
> A: "We have new pages patrollers who catch all the obvious errors."
> Q: "What happened with Seigenthaler?"
> A: "The errors weren't obvious."
> Q: "?!?!! What makes you say that."
> A: "If they were obvious, we would have caught them, since we have new
> pages patrollers who catch all the obvious errors."
>
> *cough*
>
> This line of thought completely ignores ALL the important questions
> like: are human errors possible?  Are our systems well-designed to
> minimize human error?  How did this error happen?
>
I don't think Wikipedia should settle for only catching obvious errors.

> > 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.
>
> Anthony, I'm not normally one to state harsh opinions.  But frankly, if
> you don't find those errors to be blindingly obvious, you need to find
> another hobby.  Writing an encyclopedia is quite frankly beyond you.
>
> --Jimbo

In order to determine whether or not those statements are true, one
would need to do research.  Do you dispute this?  Do you think if I
asked an average person on the street whether or not it was true that
John Seigenthaler was thought, for a brief time, to have been directly
involved in the Kennedy assassinations, that they'd say "no, of course
that isn't true"?  Personally I think they'd say "John who?"

You seem to like conversations:

Person 1: John Seigenthaler didn't move to the Soviet Union in 1971.
Person 2: Obviously.

Do you think that's a reasonable conversation?

Anthony