On Sat, 8 Oct 2005, BJ�rn Lindqvist wrote:
I don't know why, but I feel that it is much easier to write well-written emails than coherent encyclopedic prose. I suspect that atleast some other Wikipedians have the same problem.
Part of the problem is that it is often easier to talk about doing something than actually doing it. I suspect that often we all are seduced by the easier choice. ;-)
But a larger problem is that with finite amounts of time, all of us are faced with the quandry of devoting this time to (1) writing new articles; (2) improving existing articles; or (3) devoting ourselves to discussions about procedure or the first two.
I try to spend a couple of hours a day online with Wikipedia, & usually spend as much time offline doing research -- or writing. Sometimes I can write an article in 15 minutes; sometimes it takes 6 months, & that article will look worse than the one I spent 15 minutes on. There is the problem that I have to accept that I will never get an article into a "polished" state, & a rough draft at least has the chance of attracting someone who will improve on what I wrote. And then there is the problem that a given forum -- AfD, a poll , a meta or a talk page, or even this email list -- requires attention, & I have to put some of my other work on hold to pitch in. (I don't mean to sound as if I'm complaining here: I'm just stating that I can only do so much; frankly I am in awe at all of you who can not only contribute content to Wikipedia but effectively participate in several fora at once.)
[snip]
Also, the longer the text, the harder it is to add to it without "destroying it." It's like software development - introducing a new feature often requires you to redesign the whole (or large parts of) the program again. In programming, the answer is to always think ahead, structure your code and refactor often. But Wikipedians already employ those techniques with small incremental edits that slowly but surely make bad articles better.
BJ�rn makes a good point here: there are technical reasons why it is hard to keep the quality of an article high (such as the difficulty of gracefully inserting more content into an article). Sometimes we can borrow tricks from the programming world (e.g., structure our content into sections more often), but sometimes an article must get worse before it can get even better.
I'm just throwing out some ideas here in this email. The only suggestion I have is that if the quality of existing articles becomes bad enough, maybe we should declare a moritorium on new articles until the quality of enough articles is up to snuff. But I'm not sure I'd want to deal with the fallout from that decision.
Geoff