[WikiEN-l] In defence of the minor edit

[David Goodman]

I recognize the importance of the work done by those paying attention
to the details I tend to overlook, but a sensitivity to the worst of
the problems can be developed quite quickly without needing extensive
analysis.
The  result of not glancing at least for major problems, is that
people judging articles by seeing how much they've been edited will
come to the wrong conclusions entirely.

Myself, I think some sorts of BLP and copyvio problems are so serious
that I  try to keep an eye open for  them at every article I touch.
(Incidentally, a fair number of the unsourced BLPs are in fact
copyvios, and when I see that, I speedy deleted on that ground, unless
it seems important enough to rewrite. )



David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG



On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 8:59 AM, The Cunctator <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yes, trying to force people to do big edits is a bad idea.
>
> On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 8:19 AM, WereSpielChequers <
> werespielchequers at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
>> 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
>>
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