On 22/04/07, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/22/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
The problem is that doing lots of OTRS leaves one with a ridiculously distorted view of the content of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is HUGE.
I agree. Just as police officers have a distorted view of society through dealing with its worst elements constantly, OTRS volunteers are constantly subjected to the worst, most problematic articles on Wikipedia. It's easy to start thinking these are representative, rather than outliers.
These articles are indeed outliers, and we do know that - we do actually edit the rest of the wiki, on occasion, too!
But we have one point seven something million articles as of the time of writing; the absolute number of "outliers" is very, very large. And we can't simply dismiss a problem by saying "well, relatively speaking, it's a small problem" - it's still a problem. Being exposed to it continually makes you more alert to it, but that doesn't mean it's being confabulated.