On 8/17/07, Andrey <yaroslavl(a)gmail.com> wrote:
"An early version of an entry in Wikipedia
will be written by someone who
knows the subject, and later editors will dissipate whatever value is
there."
This happens very often, particularly with good and featured articles.
Many outstanding pages have been eroded by anonymous know-it-alls
into utter uselessness once their main contributors left the project.
Unless we have content arbitration boards made up of professionals in any given
field, we are likely to see an increase in complaints and a decrease in a
number of knowledgable contributors.
Definitely - I've written my fair share of articles (featured and
non-featured - I gave up on good articles, though, once I realised that it
had lost track of its original purpose), and now that I am no longer active
besides making small edits or reverting vandalism every now and then, I can
see that a lot of things I have written have fallen in quality - even when I
was active, I had this experience (someone completely erased everything I
originally wrote for [[Education in Malaysia]] and started it from scratch -
since the new revision had worthwhile content, I was in no mood to revert,
nor could I have bothered with attempting to merge old missing information
in).
But with all that, it is important to bear in mind that on the balance, the
wiki model works - nobody can say it is borked when *most* articles are
improved by more editors looking at them. What's important to recognise is
that the wiki model is nevertheless imperfect, and we need some mechanism to
reduce the proportion of articles which are worsened by new editors over
time.
Using the example of your [[Education in Malaysia]] it's the kind of
thing where you, as the original writer start with a vision of the
article as a whole, but the deterioration comes from successive small
edits which limit their focus on single phrases and sentences. Very few
of us outside of Malaysia are likely to have any interest in the subject
whatsoever, though I could see that the racial and religious divides in
that country could be the basis for controversy. To a large extent the
obsession that has developed over sourcing information has focussed
attention on the minutiae of articles, and, instead of free flowing and
readable articles, the result is articles full of axe marks or old socks
which have been too often darned.
I don't think that content arbitration boards are the solution. If that
were a winning technique Nupedia would have been more successful.
Ec