Matthew Brown wrote:
On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 6:42 PM, Ian Woollard
<ian.woollard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Another issue that admins are quite prone to
(along with many seasoned
editors) is that they tend to get *really* overprotective of articles.
Very true, and I suspect most people will get all protective of an
article they've put a lot of time into. The other half of the problem
is that edits from a new user who just happens along are often bad,
stylistically at least, and thus easy to respond negatively to even if
they have a good point inelegantly expressed.
Yeah, it's sort of tricky, because both are clearly problems, but I
think these are somewhat different problems from uncivil admins or
senior/seasoned/whatever-you-call-it Wikipedians.
I see more of the "cabal of very active editors owning an article"
problem in controversial areas. I know I don't bother editing in
Israel/Palestine space most of the time because I figure every article
is probably owned by some group of people from one side or the other,
and I don't want to expend the time to deal with figuring out how I'm
"allowed" to contribute through that screen. There are a few other
nationalism-related areas I stay out of for similar reasons
(Poland-related articles seem to be tricky more often than you'd think,
for example).
But the problematic editors aren't always senior, but sometimes are just
people who've managed to set up shop for long enough to be a problem,
especially in a niche. One of the earliest ArbCom cases involved Mr
Natural Health, someone who had been "owning" a bunch of health-related
articles, and was a problematically active but not particularly senior
or process-aware Wikipedian. And actually seasoned Wikipedians are often
useful in fixing these situations if they crop up in isolated niches---
one of the most effective ways to break a cabal's hold over a particular
group of articles is to bring them to the attention of a wider community
of editors that can swoop in and impose the usual NPOV and WP:V and
whatnot in place of that cabal's idiosyncratic take on the matter.
But I'm not sure a general attempt to keep people from owning articles
is a good solution, either. In many cases, probably a greater number
numerically, there's the opposite problem. As has been widely noted even
off-wiki, our very good articles have a tendency to revert towards the
mean, and there's no particularly good mechanism to keep that from being
the default without a lot of constant maintenance effort. That's not
really a Wikipedia-insiders vs. outsiders issue, either, as many of the
articles that started out good and later degenerated were written by
newbies (often academics in a particular area). In fact, those are the
ones that tend to degenerate the most, as occasional contributors write
a great article but then don't stay around to protect it from junk being
added. From that perspective, I'd say most good articles don't have
*enough* protectors. As per Murphy's law, the protectors are all off
protecting bad articles instead. ;-)
But I might have a biased sample, since the areas I edit in seem to
accumulate cruft. Good computer-science articles on general subjects
invariably degrade with drive-by additions of pet language examples to
the point where an article that might've once given a readable overview
of a concept is an unreadable mess of "well in Haskell, the syntax looks
like this, and in Scala, it looks like this, and you can also do it in
Smalltalk, but slightly differently, like this". History articles on
subjects even remotely popular also have a tendency to revert towards a
pastiche of pop-history junk (often with nationalist mythologizing),
unless someone is actively trying to maintain them.
But I think this is a much trickier and more subtle issue than
admin-civility or seasoned-editors-vs-newbies. Some articles need fewer
drive-by edits by newbies adding uncited content, repetition of urban
legends, or degredation of what was previously a readable exposition;
one way to get that is more watchlisting and beating back of unhelpful
'improvements'. Other articles need less attention from people with very
strong opinions about the subject.
-Mark