Jimmy Wales wrote:
But
nobody's making excuses here. I'm just saying that you will always
be able to find sore spots if you want to. If you believe in the
Wikipedia way, what you do is try to fix them or call them to the
attention to others. If you don't, then you write pissy articles about
them.
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?
Well, in principle, *all* our articles should be pretty decent, but we
have nearly a million of them in en: now, so that takes some time. Even
if you take only all high-profile articles, there's at least a few
thousand of them, so the fact that someone can find 2 of those thousands
that aren't very good at one particular moment in time isn't
particularly convincing.
I'm not convinced that any general problem has been illustrated in terms
of the editing process. If anything, the main thing illustrated (which
is already recognized) is that we don't have a good way yet of marking
particular revisions as high quality. If we did implement a sort of
'sifter' project, as long-contemplated, and people found crappy articles
among /those/, then we'd have a demonstrated problem.
-Mark