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

Sat Dec 17 20:20:18 UTC 2005

On Fri, 16 Dec 2005, Stan Shebs 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.
>
One tool that I'm a little surprised that isn't used more often is
to check whether any links exist to a supicious article. While this
property is not entirely foolproof (a prankster can insert links
either before or immediately after creating the article), this lack
of reference to relevant articles will convince me to at least flag
the article until I can find a way to conclusively prove its
validity -- or arguable importance.

Of course, this leads to the question if an article cannot be found
by a casual reader then why should we care. Or maybe the Seigenthaler
incident has already answered that.

Geoff