Carl Beckhorn wrote:
Regardless of the history, Sanger does have a viewpoint that would be worth reading even if the author were anonymous. In particular, the following claim is quite accurate to my experience:
Over the long term, the quality of a given Wikipedia article will do a random walk around the highest level of quality permitted by the most persistent and aggressive people who follow an article.
It is a nice use of rhetoric, but accurate? NOWAI!
Let me paraphrase it in a way that will make the logical flaws more apparent.
In that sentence there are buried assumptions as follows:
1. There are people on wikipedia who will not permit quality.
2. People who won't permit quality are aggressive.
3. There is a clear unambiguous metric for quality.
4. Aggressive people who won't permit quality will follow an article.
5. Over the long term, the dynamics of wikipedias practices will not prevent editors who will not allow quality on wikipedia from dragging it down to the level that they aggressively and persistently insist on bringing it down to. There are no working heuristics to allow it to transcend that attractor.
*Understanding* the logical flaws of those 5 statements is left to the student.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen