Ray Saintonge wrote:
Stan Shebs wrote:
Phil Sandifer wrote:
If Susan can make the edit from memory, we're
good. But if Susan has
to go Google the fact to find it somewhere else, we're already losing
precious seconds of Susan's time.
But how does that work out overall, when you save seconds of Susan's
time, and cost me a half-hour of research to figure out why an article
is inconsistent with all the ones it links with? Scholarship is tricky
enough on its own, we don't need to make it harder by mixing in a bunch
of random half-remembered bits.
This is one of those half-empty or half-full kinds of arguments.
Without Susan's edit her idea might never have been raised. What she
sees as half-full you see as half-empty. You evidently enjoyed your
half-hour of research, or you would not have done it. The point that
she made was worth that much of your time. At least you researched it.
The one who simply dismisses her comments out of hand and without
comment is really committing the same error that she did.
That's not a very good line of reasoning - vandalism sprees must also be
good things, because we spend a lot of time cleaning up after them, so
we must be enjoying doing so? I don't think so. No, when I clean up
after someone who didn't take the trouble to find out if a statement is
actually true, that person has just wasted my time. I used to watch a
lot of articles (19,000 at the high point), and it was multiple hours of
drudgery each day; eventually I cleared the list. Casual editors adding
bad material from memory is actually a worse problem for good articles
than vandalism, because it's good-faith and often looks plausible; it
can get by you and mislead readers for months, and worse, start seeping
into connected articles as others "correct" them to be consistent. So
even the what-does-it-hurt edit to an already-unsourced stub can have
consequences. Driveby editing was a great way to build up WP, but now
that we have the vast structure, we also need to think about how to
maintain its integrity.
Stan