On 5/21/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Get rid of the culture of fear where an editor avoids being bold to avoid arguments.
Yes. The trouble is, edit wars have an effect far wider than just the article where they take place. Peopel hear about them, and expect to run into them everywhere. The fact is, in the various random topics I've edited, I've only ever hit two edit wars. Occasionally people revert changes, but usually in good faith - the changes were simply incorrect.
On the other hand, I very, very frequently break up unstructured articles into sections, wikify, or rearrange sections into some kind of order - the very basic sort of editing that anyone can do, but that people seem afraid to? It's actually really trivial to read an article paragraph by paragraph and add a ==section heading== before each one summarising what it's about, and it's so helpful. Once that's done you can actually begin to see the article as whole and see what's missing, rather than just seeing that there's lots of text, and maybe it has enough text?
Steve