[WikiEN-l] a valid criticism

Sun Oct 9 01:32:19 UTC 2005

On 10/8/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> It disappoints me to hear a Wikipedian take this attitude towards
> quality.  "So what?"  So -- we're trying to be better than this, that's
> what.

Well, I'm all for aspiration, but I think in practice we cannot
honestly suspect that people will not be able to find spotty articles
when they want to. Even in publications with professionally trained,
full-time editors this is a major problem (I say this as someone who
in a previous life worked in a number of publishing and fact-checking
jobs). In a situation where one is relying upon the volunteer and
usually amateur labor of thousands of editors... it seems unavoidable.
But of course that is just my gut sense of it.

I don't mean this to sound pessimistic. I think Wikipedia will always
have a great many articles of very high quality. But I also think it
will also have a great many articles of poor quality. This in no means
should sound either discouraging or discouraged. I just think it's a
fact of how a project of this sort will work in practice and I think
it will be a constant tension. But let's not forget that tensions can
be productive! The reason many editors (myself being one of them) got
hooked on Wikipedia in the first place was discovering a sub-par
article on something they knew about and, instead of writing off the
whole idea, said "I can fix this!" and just never stopped.

> I don't think this is what our general response to this sort of
> complaint should be.  I think our response should be: hey, you know
> what, he's right!  These articles ought to be pretty decent, but they
> aren't.  Why?  What can we do to improve?
>
> If we study it up one side and down the other and conclude that there is
> nothing to be done about it, then fine.  But we should not just accept
> the current state of affairs if there are sensible proposals for
> improvement.

Well, I admit to making two major assumptions: 1. that the reason
there will be spotty places like this is because of the wiki model
itself and 2. that the wiki model has many other benefits and I
wouldn't want to change it very much. You might be right in
questioning my assumptions in the first case -- that this isn't
something inherent to the model. It may of course be that my version
of "the wiki model" is different than yours but I suspect it is not
that different.

> I don't have a problem with eventualism -- but 'eventualism' is not the
> same as saying "so what?" to quality problems.

Okay, I agree with that. My "so what?" was only to the fact that
Wikipedia sometimes has spotty content. I do somewhat suspect this is
going to be inherent to the project -- at any given moment, there
might be things which need work. But I could be very wrong on that, of
course, and hopefully I am!

I don't think there's a massive "quality" problem that isn't to be
expected from a system of this sort. I think the fact that there is
some very high-quality work is proof enough that this system doesn't
*necessarily* lead to poor or spotty content, which is what most of
these critics generally seem to be implying.

It would be interesting, as a fact-finding exercise, for someone to
sit down with the histories of these two articles as well as the
histories of two featured articles and look at what the patterns of
editing were and see if any generalizable conclusions could be drawn.
I'm not sure if it would give any actionable policy, but could at
least reduce the armchair philosophizing (which I'm of course always
happy to take part in, being somewhat of a pedant).

FF