On 8/6/2010 9:13 PM, William Beutler wrote:
I'm not completely sure where SC was going with
his observation about
"Destructionism" -- I took it as a clever play on "Deletionism" and
all the
other -isms, to point out a phenomenon he's noticed on at least En-WP, which
I recognized immediately.
I think we're comparing apples with oranges here. From how I see it,
"destructionism" identifies the nature of articles themselves over time
while "deletionism" (as well as the other established "-isms")
identifies the nature of editors' behaviors and mainspace philosophies.
That being said, some other comments:
I do believe that the quality of articles do deteriorate over time,
especially when not watched or updated. That is the inevitable nature of
an open editing environment. This may be due to several reasons; this
could be that the article doesn't have many watchers or that the main
contributor(s) is/are no longer watching the article or no longer cares.
This allows editors who do not know nor likely care to chip away at the
article's quality and accuracy to a point where it either becomes
apparent a cleanup effort is needed or that a GA reassessment or FA
review is needed.
Also, standards for promoting articles to GA or FA were lower than they
are now, mostly due to the overall quality of Wikipedia articles
steadily increasing. I opine that most articles that were promoted to FA
in 2006 or earlier would not meet today's more stringent FA standards.
Case in point, I just finished with an FA review of "Nintendo
Entertainment System"
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Entertainment_System) which ended
up being delisted from FA status. It was promoted back in January 2005.
I think both of my last two paragraphs come into play as, while a very
popular article with over 200 people watchlisting it, nobody took any
efforts to cleanup or maintain the article those 5 1/2 years it was an
FA, and you get a lot of users who do not know better as far as
verifiability is concerned who add whatever they want with nobody
checking or challenging it. On the other hand, when I combed through the
article in detail, I was surprised to see how poor the quality of the
article was, that this would not pass for GA let alone FA today.
This brings us back to one of the original "standing orders" of
Wikipedia way back in its early years
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Historical_archive/Rules_to_consider)
of "Always leave something undone". Personally, I reject such principle
as I believe users should contribute as much as they possibly can to an
article. If others can contribute something different, great; if not, we
have over 3.5 million other articles that need work or similar
attention. There is more than enough work to go around for everyone.
(The problem is IMO is that the vast majority of them hover around and
devote all their time and energy to only a select few articles like
Obama or heaven forbid Pikachu, for instance.)
-MuZemike