From: Delirium delirium@hackish.org Reply-To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Loosing more of our best contributors Date: Sun, 10 Oct 2004 04:37:10 -0400
To add additional perspective, he's also single-handedly written some of our best, in-depth wiki articles, as well as forged consensus on some difficult topics, such as [[Anti-Zionism]]. Much of his frustration seems to stem from the fact that, even after such difficult consensus is forged, the wiki method means that any random POV pusher can come in and mangle the article, which has happened on [[Anti-Zionism]] on numerous occasions. Unless a group of knowledgeable people are willing to waste their time baby-sitting an article, which usually amounts to revert-wars (since rarely are the additions even remotely helpful), the articles go rapidly downhill, wasting the effort of the people who painstakingly put together a quality article on a contentious subject.
I'd have to say I agree with that criticism. I've wasted some time myself on some of these contentious subjects, only to come back a few months later and find an abysmally horrid article in its place. Now I could start over again and try to hammer that article back into a reasonable state, or I could just revert to my 3-month-old version, or I could give up and say, "fine, the crappy article can stay". And, increasingly, a lot of people are taking the third option.
Exactly. As my watchilist grows I find myself spending no time actually creating content, and all my time monitoring existing articles with painfully reached NPOV, as each new POV warrior discovers Wikipedia and decides to add a few "relevant" comments promoting his/her POV, which in turn prompts other to insert their own POV, etc. Or, as I've more recently been experiencing, the replace the article entirely with their own POV version. In the latter case, if they don't ultimately get their way, they often create new articles with their own POV under similar titles, or highly POV titles, as a back-door to getting their way. If these articles are eventually discovered, they are often listed for VfD or re-direct, a process which usually takes further weeks of negotiation. In the end, we're either left with wikijunk, or a mass of overlapping articles, or (in the best case) the POV warriors eventually abandon their quest, having wasted many person-days of individual editors times which could have been far more profitably spent creating new content.
Jay.
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