Luna lunasantin@gmail.com to English show details Jan 18 (1 day ago) On 1/18/07, Matt R matt_crypto@yahoo.co.uk wrote:
"One thing that I think I didn't realize sufficiently, when writing about this question a few months ago (at embarrassing length, before the pilot project was well under way), is that the very presence of fair-to-middling articles from WP is actually a strong disincentive for people to get to work. It's like this: when you get down to brass tacks, it's no fun to clean up the mediocre work of Wikipedians. It might be a hell of a lot more fun to start over from scratch."
All ego and cat calls aside, the man's got a point -- people go where they're interested, and writing brand new articles "in your own image" is often more interesting than cleanup work. Whatever works for them; it's their project, after all. Also, if you just write your own article, you don't have to worry about other editors who jealously guard their crap. As far as I've seen most of the very best of Wikipedia is written by people who don't mind other editors contributing to the article, and the very worst is written by people who don't very much mind other editors contributing or fixing.
Two of the worst articles I've seen this month are one article that is so poorly written even its editors didn't bother to read it, but they ganged up efficiently to prevent it being fixed to readability level, and a small biography of a man whose editor and his 8 or 6 sock puppets (he swears one was never his sock, only the other 7 or 5 were) ganged up to fight every spelling, grammar, style, and format fix that improved the article, ferociously determined to guilt trip to death anyone who tried to enhance it. It eventually got fixed by the fourth editor to attempt to do so, in spite of being hassled and overwritten the entire time.
Still, Wikipedia needs to clean up some of their own articles. The start-up at Citizenpedia is so difficult to understand, the registering, the e-mail, no examples of their articles that you can look at without registering, that it has marked itself for failure. Why bother discuss them, when they've decided to design themselves in a way destined to make for failure?
Anyone can not only edit, anyone often does a good job, particularly when they're working well with a bunch of other anyones.
KP