On 10/10/05, uninvited(a)nerstrand.net
<uninvited(a)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