[WikiEN-l] Re: The whole point of wikipedia

Thu Oct 20 19:03:25 UTC 2005

Fighting vandalism does take away a lot of time from good editors that
could be much better spent elsewhere.
A couple of months ago I looked at [[Adolf Hitler]] and spotted an
embarassing mistake in it. I started wondering how it could stay in
for months when there are truly knowledgable editors watching it all
the time.

It is one of the pages being subjected to constant vandalism, which
makes it nearly impossible to track the good faith edits, since they
are mixed up with the bad stuff. There is simply too much noise in the
page history.

You need to check out the diffs all the time and you can't always
simply revert, because sometimes good faith edits are mixed up with
bad faith edits. I think it takes a lot of time just to keep the
article from deteriorating into a mess, let alone improving it.

I think fighting vandalism this way is a truly stupid waste of time.

Something needs to change.

nyenyec

On 10/20/05, Martin Richards <Martin at velocitymanager.com> wrote:
> From: "Tony Sidaway"
>
> > I'm suggesting that it's not around in significant amounts.   I find
> > some now and again.   I find instances of poor quality writing and bad
> > organization more often.  A few articles are prone to link-spamming,
> > others get POV-pushing.  Compared to that, old vandalism is rather
> > rare.