[WikiEN-l] In defence of the minor edit

[WereSpielChequers]

I'm afraid I have to disagree with David Goodman's final paragraph
calling for an end to minor improvements to articles. I have done many
thousands of such minor edits in my time, tasks such as going through
all the articles with the word preformed and changing almost all to
performed. That has resulted in my making minor improvements to many
articles which I care nothing about and don't read more than the
paragraph or sentence that I fix, other times I find an article
interesting, read the whole thing and perhaps come across something
else I can correct. I believe that on the whole what I do is useful,
and I enjoy doing it. If I was paid to systematically go through
wikipedia articles checking each whole article completely and fixing
the errors I find, I am pretty sure the total improvement to Wikipedia
I would make would be less per hour than my contributions as a
volunteer, and of course there is the little matter of cost. Enabling
volunteers to improve the bits of Wikipedia that they volunteer to do
is much more cost effective than employing people and telling them
what to work on.

WereSpielChequers

> The change that would make the biggest difference is that each person
> who looks at an article for any reason , such as fixing typos or
> adding categories or disam links, actually try to spot any serious
> problems, not just do the routine task they came for. There are too
> many BLPs that have been looked at twenty times, but none of them
> carefully.
>
> David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG