[WikiEN-l] Article quality deterioration (was: a valid criticism)

Tue Oct 11 01:20:48 UTC 2005

On 10/10/05, slimvirgin at gmail.com <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/10/05, uninvited at nerstrand.net <uninvited at nerstrand.net> wrote:
> > The problem is that people come along and make incremental changes each
> > of which, taken alone, is unremarkable -- neither helpful nor
> > especially detrimental to the article.  In aggregate, such changes
> > destroy the organization of the article and compromise any stylistic
> > unity that may be present.
> >
> > Such changes should really be reverted when they are made, with a kind
> > note offered to the other editor.
> >
> > But Responsible Wikipedians Don't Revert Changes.
> >
> > We have a culture of egalitarianism and a culture where reverting
> > changes is strongly discouraged.
>
> Right, this is a real problem. We've got an RfC going at the moment
> about an editor accused of reverting too much, when what he was doing
> was trying to preserve halfway-decent writing, and one of the people
> who has commented here in praise of good writing has criticized this
> editor in the RfC for reverting too much, which strikes me as somewhat
> contradictory.
>
> What are we supposed to do when editors cause the writing in an
> article to deteriorate, if  not revert? Are a bunch of people who care
> about good writing supposed to be on hand constantly to carefully tidy
> up after others, just so that we can avoid wholesale reverting? It
> simply isn't realistic to expect that. The fact is that lots of
> editors add material that is badly written, badly sourced, unsourced,
> and wrong -- and reverting, including repeatedly reverting, is
> sometimes the only practical way to keep the page reasonably
> encyclopedic looking.

Slimvirgin's points are well founded, and that's why the 3RR is
problematic - at just six edits, it freezes the relationship between
the two parties, forcing an artifical stalemate with no real incentive
for compromise.

In fact, more often, the 24 hour ban is employed, causing even more
rancor and bad feelings for one party. That 3RR is not an entitlement,
but an electric fence, brings problems too - it's used inconsistently
and extends banning to a whole class of editors that had never been
subject to it before. It's the [[Taser]] of Wikipedia, with many of
the pitfalls of the supposed 'non-lethal' weapon.

But there is an elegant solution somewhere between protecting an
article (too rigid) and article rating (too complex) - every article
can have a marker indicating the last-agree-upon-version. Anyone can
change the marker to point to a particular version in the edit
history, in wiki fashion. In effect, it would be the version that "the
crowd" considers the most acceptable one, while editing, sparring,
major revisions are happening on the 'current' one. If there is
consensus that it is generally good, the marker can be moved upon
every edit to be the current one. Or if overhauling is being done, the
marker can be kept back to an older rev while issues are ironed out.
(It removes the angst of having your edits "winning" and being in the
current version, and removes much of the 3RR angst.)

The marker system is easy to understand, straightforward to implement,
minimally impacts current working methods, does not require agreed
upon metric values, and is inherently wiki.

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)