[WikiEN-l] Slipping quality as Wikipedia gets bigger (formerly Can you trust Wikipedia?)

[Puddl Duk]

On 10/30/05, Tom Cadden <thomcadden at yahoo.ie> wrote:

> ...I was off Wikipedia for a month and when I
> came back I noticed that a host of articles I had
> keeping an eye on because they were in my area of
> expertise had had some appalling edits done.

I rarely edit in my area of expertise for just this reason, too disturbing.

>... the people who had brought the articles up to a very
> high standard had either left Wikipedia (some driven
> away from the frustration of trying to maintain
> quality, or because they had other commitments
> elsewhere), were working elsewhere on Wikipedia, or
> were simply fed up constantly proofing edits in those
> articles...

We should be doing everything we can to encourage people who create
high quality work. These people often aren't the kind who come to
Wikipedia for interaction and socializing. They often contrast to the
large numbers in our community who *do* interact a lot.

Case in point, DrBob is a good editor. He's an expert on optics,
writes well, makes great illustrations and has been a contributer for
over FOUR years. He has about 2000 edits, actually more - some were
lost in software changes long ago. He takes an occasional wikibreak of
several months every year.

His admin nomination is being torpedoed because he "doesn't interact
enough", despite the fact that he has been a volunteer on the
wikipedia reference desks for over two years. Not only does he
occasionally seek out interaction, but he is good at it.

This is the most idiotic no vote I've ever seen at RFA.  Ability and
desire to interact a lot will certainly help in some areas of
wikipedia, administrator or not, but not the main administrative
duties- vandalism revert, speedy deletes, copyvio cleanup and IP
blocking. Remeber, this is not a person with no interaction, quite the
opposite; this is an editor who seeks interaction from time in the
communites public forms.

Admin's are NOT mediators, or mothers, or babysitters. The vast
majority of their work doesn't require much interaction. If a guy has
chosen not to interact on the the talk pages of politically charged
middleast related articles in the last four years (where special
interaction skills might help) then giving him admin power is not
likely to change this.

Furthermore, we need a diverse goup of adminstrators and users alike.
Requiring a ton of interaction for administratorship will cut out, in
one fell swoop, all the quiet, hard working people who are here to
write an encyclopedia, silently toiling behind the scenes. I think
people like these are currently some of the very best admins. And I
sometimes think that reserves silence and wisdome go hand in hand.