Certainly, it still describes a real phenomenon: articles that attain Featured or Good status, and then have those statuses (statii?) revoked as they degrade. It happens, all right.
As a concept, it bears thinking about. I'm not necessarily saying there should be a hold placed on articles that have attained those statuses... OK, maybe I am. Limit editing to autoconfirmed editors? Obviously when FAs reach the front page, unhelpful editing pretty much always follows. I don't see it as a terrible thing that editing be slowed down on those articles, for instance. It took a lot of considered work to get there. Maybe it should take some consideration to change them.
On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 8:40 PM, stevertigo stvrtg@gmail.com wrote:
David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
People come to Wikipedia for its breadth of coverage, not its polished writing. Indeed, some articles decay into mush. I didn't say polishing was easy
- it isn't, which is why the people who do it get so resentful.
I do work hard at polishing ledes, and Im not unhappy when something Ive written stands the test of time. But there are times when it seems that open editing model itself was nothing more a bad idea. I guess this idea reflects a bit of that pessimism. :-)
The 'decay into mush' point is well made. Its difficult sometimes for one to justify to oneself the effort required to overcome mush-ism - particularly when its an adversarial system (WP:BRD). Its the adversarial systems which seem to be paradoxically constructive and destructive at the same time.
-SC
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