On 10/10/05, uninvited@nerstrand.net uninvited@nerstrand.net wrote:
The problem is that people come along and make incremental changes each of which, taken alone, is unremarkable -- neither helpful nor especially detrimental to the article. In aggregate, such changes destroy the organization of the article and compromise any stylistic unity that may be present.
Such changes should really be reverted when they are made, with a kind note offered to the other editor.
But Responsible Wikipedians Don't Revert Changes.
We have a culture of egalitarianism and a culture where reverting changes is strongly discouraged.
Right, this is a real problem. We've got an RfC going at the moment about an editor accused of reverting too much, when what he was doing was trying to preserve halfway-decent writing, and one of the people who has commented here in praise of good writing has criticized this editor in the RfC for reverting too much, which strikes me as somewhat contradictory.
What are we supposed to do when editors cause the writing in an article to deteriorate, if not revert? Are a bunch of people who care about good writing supposed to be on hand constantly to carefully tidy up after others, just so that we can avoid wholesale reverting? It simply isn't realistic to expect that. The fact is that lots of editors add material that is badly written, badly sourced, unsourced, and wrong -- and reverting, including repeatedly reverting, is sometimes the only practical way to keep the page reasonably encyclopedic looking.
Sarah