Steve Bennett wrote:
On 4/10/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
More often than not, people will add stuff to an article, and some time later, another editor will come along and clean it up. Then some more stuff will be added, and some time later, it will get cleaned up again. Very rarely do you see an article /only/ get better (one example I *can* think of is [[Jordanhill railway station]] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordanhill_railway_station), but that was an extraordinary case.
Someone should do some analysis of Wikipedia article development cycles/processes. For some articles, I think in terms of an accordeon model. People add content, which is full of air, redundancy etc. Then more people add content in the same style. Then someone comes along and squeezes the whole lot down to its basic essence. A 500 word paragraph becomes a 200 word paragraph, almost without losing information.
Other times, I see a huge slab of prose which has become so big that people feel uncomfortable adding to it. They see that the "History of X" section of the article is so long, they shouldn't touch it any more. I simply insert subheadings by year, and suddenly they realise that the period 1950-1960 is totally blank. I don't have a name for that model.
The wiki model? :)