[WikiEN-l] a valid criticism

Fri Oct 7 00:21:06 UTC 2005

Jimmy Wales wrote:

>http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2005/10/the_amorality_o.php
>
>I don't agree with much of this critique, and I certainly do not share
>the attitude that Wikipedia is better than Britannica merely because it
>is free.  It is my intention that we aim at Britannica-or-better
>quality, period, free or non-free.  We should strive to be the best.
>
>But the two examples he puts forward are, quite frankly, a horrific
>embarassment.  [[Bill Gates]] and [[Jane Fonda]] are nearly unreadable crap.
>
>Why?  What can we do about it?
>
1. We need more editors. Although the raw numbers are large, the
number of articles is even larger, and so there are not enough
editors to go around. It's kind of disturbing when a) I have to
create an article on a subject in which I'm not that knowledgeable,
because there is nobody more knowledgeable creating it, and b) I
learn more about the subject, realize I made a major factual error,
and go back to it six months later, only to find that the only changes
in the interim have been to disambiguate some links and recategorize
the article five times, while the howler has been carefully preserved.
Where are all the subject-matter experts?

2. We need a way to discourage well-meaning but less-able editors
from crumbling good articles. On my watchlist I see a lot of editors
(some logins, some anons) adding nonsequiturs or redundancies,
randomly rearranging text, adding useless templates en masse, etc.
They're not vandalism, but they're not improvements either, and
most of them I just let slide by because they're stylistic rather
than factual, and it's disheartening to argue with people about
style over and over. A vicious circle though, because if I feel
like an article is inexorably going downhill, I'm less and less
motivated to try to halt the slide. Not quite the same as article
rating, it seems more like we want articles to gradually get harder
to edit as they gradually get better.

Stan