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

Fri Dec 16 20:20:27 UTC 2005

Jimmy Wales wrote:

(re: [[John Seigenthaler Sr.]])

> 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

See, they wouldn't have been "blatantly obvious" to me either.

> 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.

Newpages patrol typically doesn't take or have the time to do that. It's
a firehose of slush-pile quality information. It's about a first cull.

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

It passed *basic* ones, which is how it survived Newpages patrol. Basic
quality standards for Newpages means more or less that's it's shaped
enough like something that might be a Wikipedia article not to shoot on
sight.

What it would need is something like what someone else mooted, a
biography patrol. Which is a damn fine idea, I think.

- d.