On 10/10/05, slimvirgin@gmail.com slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
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.
Slimvirgin's points are well founded, and that's why the 3RR is problematic - at just six edits, it freezes the relationship between the two parties, forcing an artifical stalemate with no real incentive for compromise.
In fact, more often, the 24 hour ban is employed, causing even more rancor and bad feelings for one party. That 3RR is not an entitlement, but an electric fence, brings problems too - it's used inconsistently and extends banning to a whole class of editors that had never been subject to it before. It's the [[Taser]] of Wikipedia, with many of the pitfalls of the supposed 'non-lethal' weapon.
But there is an elegant solution somewhere between protecting an article (too rigid) and article rating (too complex) - every article can have a marker indicating the last-agree-upon-version. Anyone can change the marker to point to a particular version in the edit history, in wiki fashion. In effect, it would be the version that "the crowd" considers the most acceptable one, while editing, sparring, major revisions are happening on the 'current' one. If there is consensus that it is generally good, the marker can be moved upon every edit to be the current one. Or if overhauling is being done, the marker can be kept back to an older rev while issues are ironed out. (It removes the angst of having your edits "winning" and being in the current version, and removes much of the 3RR angst.)
The marker system is easy to understand, straightforward to implement, minimally impacts current working methods, does not require agreed upon metric values, and is inherently wiki.
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)