[WikiEN-l] Re: Taking your eyes off the ball

Mon Oct 3 11:58:14 UTC 2005

 >I'm going to grouse a bit.
 >
Very good. Now I'm going to just rant a bit (ok, a lot) :).

 >I think far, far too much attention gets paid to the worst articles on
 >Wikipedia - the studs, the vanity articles, the stuff of debatable
 >notability (schools!!) while not nearly enough effort goes into making
 >crappy articles into good ones.

YES. Finally someone says the real problem.

 >
 >People on AFD love to argue about the crappiest articles. (It also 
tends
 >to spill over to this mailing list) On the other side of the spectrum,
 >the percentage of featured articles (number of featured articles / 
total
 >number of articles) has been rapidly declining since March.
 >(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_article_statistics).
 >And yet no one seems care. Sometime this month, percentage of featured
 >articles will drop below 0.1% -- less than 1 article in 1000 being a
 >featured article.

OK, there are a lot of reasons with this. One are the new higher 
standards that are being imposed. Between Me, Tony1, and SimonP the 
standards are quite high - just look at the number of featured article 
candidates (FACs) - now there is around 10 - just a few weeks ago there 
were like 40 and then people were complaining because there were too 
many!!!

Another thing is the inevitable controversy. When working on something 
that a lot of people have opinions on you run into a lot of heated 
debates. In addition, on many of those articles you're going to run 
into obvious POV pushers who just don't get it - see my long response at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Redwolf24#Pop_singer_fancruft
to someone distressed because (s)he was trying to clean up pop singer 
articles. It really is not a rewarding experience most of the time to 
deal with articles like that.

For example, when I was trying to clean up the autism/asperger's 
syndrome articles I was accused of a "premeditated act of malicious 
child harm", equated to a Nazi more than once, and accused of 
suppressing peoples' views. In addition, you run into people from 
extreme internet groups that come to WP for the sole purpose of having 
their group's POV pushed on any related wiki page in addition to the 
group itself having a page for recognition. Then there are the daily 
battles to keep it accurate and the original research people out (its 
difficult to get original research deleted on AfD, ironically :)). Its 
quite the circus and requires an unreasonable amount of time from 
someone, and really isn't that satisfying at all. Plus, just editing 
these articles often will give you the dooming "controversial" label, 
giving you to many oppose votes on your RfA or what have you 
(generalizing), so many people who are good editors just don't bother 
running.

So, in the end its a lot easier just working on uncontroversial 
articles that are usually highly techinical in nature (SimonP's 
mercantalism masterpiece comes to mind).

I mean you look at a high-profile article like Microsoft. I remember my 
first edit was to the talk page of that article complaining about the 
obvious POV ranting on that page back in march - I didn't even have 
another edit until late july because I thought it would get "fixed"... 
- of course I ended up having to do it all myself... which seems to be 
a common theme around here. I mean just yesterday I did a complete 
rewrite of the hacker article because it was a mess and just wrong in a 
lot of places. It only took me an hour, so I don't quite understand why 
with 10,000 or so viewers of the page no one else bothered. Whatever 
happened to WP:BOLD?

I really do think the FAC process itself is great though. It has two 
real problems:
1)Hit and run opposers - if you are going to oppose you don't need to 
help with the article but you need to pay attention to updated comments.
2)People who just nominate an article and never change it during the 
FAC. For some reason this happens with like half of them and its really 
annoying.
3)People who oppose because they don't like the article or don't like 
the type of article.

There is also peer review - which as everyone who visits there knows 
I'm rather prolific at :). I think people should be restricted to 
nominating one article per person per two weeks - otherwise you have 
the A Link to the past flood of 30 peer review requests in the same 
day. As the point of peer review is to get the article to FA status - 
which is not easy and is not supposed to be! It should take you at 
LEAST two weeks to get one article up to FA status, maybe less with 
help.

 >
 >Am I the only one who thinks we have our priorities out of order? We 
are
 >we spending so much energy arguing about the horrible stuff that (for
 >all intents) will never be seen or noticed when our important articles
 >(think - Michael Brown, Tom DeLay, John  Roberts) are, well, not very 
good?
 >

OK - there is a systemic problem with these pages as well. Its not all 
that obvious - its that people seem to come to wikipedia to debate 
politics instead of discuss actual content. Wikipedia is a horrible 
place to debate politics - discussions are fractured and are archived 
fast. People need to stick to content and stick to NPOV through 
comprimises. Also, as evidenced by the Bush article, going back and 
forth between various POVs doesn't work that well - that content needs 
to be balanced and it needs to stick to neutral language and cite 
reputable sources.

OK, sorry for the long rant :).

RN