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

Sat Dec 17 08:41:59 UTC 2005

Interesting you should mention biology, as there are
few things on the planet Earth I know less about than
that.  But I'm sure most of us could, with a modest
amount of effort, compose a plausible article in our
own subject specialties that would pass a cursory new
pages patrol check.  

The JFK assassination is one of my specialties, and I
do my best to make the many, many, many WP articles on
that topic a little more sane. If the Seigenthaler
article had shown up in Category:JFK assassination or
even been linked to [[JFK assassination]], I most
likely would have spotted it and saved us a lot of
grief.  And yes, I try to RC patrol as much as
possible, but I can only be on WP about 18 hours a
day. ;)

But I honesty don't believe that you need any
specialized knowledge of US history or the JFK
assassination to spot a whopper like the one in the
Seigenthaler article. This isn't an article carefully
crafted by an expert to slip under the radar, it's a
prank that a UPS guy tossed off on his coffee break. 
Are we really so easily fooled?  All that we need to
spot things like that is a critical, skeptical eye.  

Stan Shebs shebs at apple.com wrote:

Heh, I guarantee you that I could create a
ichthyological whopper,
pun intended, with pictures and citations from some of
the rarer
books in my personal library, and it will slip right
by you, plus
everyone else who doesn't happen to have those books
to check. I bet
I could even get it into the day's DYK!

But if you don't know enough to evaluate, say, the
plausibility of
an article about the popular home aquarium fish
Melanocetus, I'm
not going to take that as evidence you should not be
editing the
encyclopedia; it just means that no one person can
know enough to
be able to make accurate quick judgments on each new
article. We
need better teamwork, not just individual prowess.

Come to think of it, why didn't *you* personally catch
the bogus
Seigenthaler article? Seems like it should be right in
one of
your areas of special knowledge, right? And don't you
RC patrol?

Stan

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