[WikiEN-l] a valid criticism

Fri Oct 7 20:11:55 UTC 2005

Ryan Delaney wrote:

>Stan Shebs wrote:
>
>
>>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.
>>
>
>I've actually had some luck with this. If someone makes an edit that
>doesn't hurt anything, but doesn't add anything either, I simply
>revert with the edit summary "rv: not an improvement". This seems to
>send a message to people that edits need to be constructive and have a
>plan behind them. Just moving stuff around isn't good for the Wiki,
>and a solitary edit like this could seem to have no effect, but in the
>aggregate they can make for a ridiculously disorganized article that
>is not at all a pleasure to read.
>
>
Heh, that's tougher than I've generally been willing to be. Seems all
too easy to trigger edit wars and accusations of newbie-biting, but
softening it by explaining the rationale takes time away from content
improvement. Explanations are worth the trouble if the person is going
to be a long-term contributor, but not if they're one of the "two-day
wonders" that are active for only a short time.

Another one of my hesitations in reverting is that oftentimes a good
edit, say a spelling fix, is intermixed with more ambitious tinkering,
as the editor starts with the obvious fix and then is emboldened to do
more. Then it gets time-consuming to undo only part of an edit.

This circles back to the back to the shortage of editors too; while
it can be engaging to do stylistic fixup, vandalism patrol, etc, I
find that it can easily suck up my entire available WP time, leaving
no cycles for contributing in the areas where I have unique expertise.
I see that happening with other editors too. WP being a volunteer
organization, people will always work on what they want to work on,
and many SMEs enjoy working outside their field, but if your goal is
to build the best possible encyclopedia, you want your Nobel laureates
to write about their research, not to feel like they have to mop
floors or scrape gum off the undersides of desks because otherwise
it won't get done.

Stan