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

Fri Dec 16 18:25:17 UTC 2005

Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Anthony DiPierro wrote:
>
>>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.
>
I have to admit I probably wouldn't have flagged these as out of
the ordinary either. There are hundreds of JFK conspiracy theories,
many involving unlikely-seeming people, and there are many USians
who have lived in the Soviet Union for long periods, people working
at the embassy for example. WP has a long tradition of "strange but
true" material, as witness [[crushing by elephant]] and the whole
exploding animals series, so strangeness alone does not trigger
many alarms.

RC patrol sometimes seems a little like a checkpoint in Iraq; the
volume of oncoming traffic is such that you only get a few seconds
to assess each edit as "plausible" or "bogus", and either pull the
trigger or let it pass. Just the other day somebody reverted as
vandalism an anon's mention of a proposal for a maglev train from
Los Angeles to Las Vegas. But I remembered reading about it in the
paper, and a moment of Googling turned up all the details. I only
noticed this deletion because the article happened to be on my
watchlist because I had added a picture to it once.

If you really want to keep the vandals and pranksters from getting
through, you either need more volunteers on patrol (Shinseki says
300,000 at least :-) ), or use them more efficiently, or cut down
on the inflow somehow.

Stan