On 12/25/05, Steve Bennett <stevage(a)gmail.com> wrote:
WP is an encyclopaedia and does whatever quality
control is necessary.
I think I can go along with that. What upset me at the time was that
the editor experience of legitimate editors of that article was being
very seriously degraded for no apparent good reason. Vandalism
continued to rise. It has fallen since, though I'm not convinced that
the rise and fall can be attributed to the application and removal of
the NOEDITSECTION directive (which has been absent from the article
now for four or five days). Rather, I think that the NOEDITSECTION
was an imposition that disproportionately hit legitimate editors of
the article, while delivering no measurable reduction of vandalism in
the face of a sustained campaign of vandalism by a particular person
or group--the kind of campaign that I know from experience can be
ignored, because it has little of no effect on the ability of good
faith editors to continue their work.
That the article sufffered its worst week of vandalism during the
period of the NOEDITSECTION is a correlation where I truly believe it
would be inappropriate at this stage to make a definitive assignment
of which was cause and which was effect. However I still see
absolutely no coherent elucidation of a mechanism by which this
directive could be expected to reduce vandalism in the first place--so
it's failure was hugely unsurprising.
I've more to say but I'll put it into a more general post which will
go to a number of mailing lists.