On 10/10/05, uninvited@nerstrand.net uninvited@nerstrand.net wrote:
The problem is that people come along and make incremental changes each of which, taken alone, is unremarkable -- neither helpful nor especially detrimental to the article. In aggregate, such changes destroy the organization of the article and compromise any
stylistic
unity that may be present.
What are we supposed to do when editors cause the writing in an article to deteriorate, if not revert? Are a bunch of people who care about good writing supposed to be on hand constantly to carefully tidy up after others, just so that we can avoid wholesale reverting?
Sarah
I agree with both Uninvited and Sarah (SlimVirgin) about piecemeal revisions. It simply doesn't work, much of the time.
The only solution is a periodic full re-write of the article. The [[cult]] article is a good example. I've given it a full rewrite once or twice already. The last time, I made sure I found a definition of "cult" which all sides could agree on and stuck in the intro. The last time I checked, the definition had survived the test of time: no reverts by ANY parties in over 6 months. (The article might have been renamed to [[list of purported cults]] or the like.)
The key is to come up with an intro (in a paragraph or two) which provides a theme that unifies the remainder (body) of the article. Anyway, this is the approach that the peace foundations EP is using. I believe Britannica uses the same approach.
Ed Poor