From: Delirium delirium@hackish.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Loosing more of our best contributors
I'd have to say I agree with that criticism. I've wasted some time myself on some of these contentious subjects, only to come back a few months later and find an abysmally horrid article in its place. Now I could start over again and try to hammer that article back into a reasonable state, or I could just revert to my 3-month-old version, or I could give up and say, "fine, the crappy article can stay". And, increasingly, a lot of people are taking the third option.
-Mark
I can relate to that. Even with non-contentious articles. I call it the "months later" effect. One of the delusions of Wikipedia is that when one has done good work, and an article receives no comments or further edits, that the article has somehow been accepted or approved. In most cases, I suspect, it just hasn't been noticed.
There's one article which I really, really liked a few months ago. Factual, vigorous, lively, and the collaborative product of many contributors. In the meantime, a new editor appeared and, _while in fact remaining within the bounds of good behavior_, reshaped it to his personal vision by extremely assertive editing of the article, monitoring it, and challenging any other edits that don't fit his point of view (which of course he regards as "neutral"). There's nothing actually wrong with the new article but _I just don't like it_.
One of the big problems with "hammering out consensus" in _any_ organization is the arrival of newcomers who did not take part in forming that consensus. I've seen it almost every place that I've worked. Someone will propose something that seems outrageous, and someone will pipe up and say, "But we spent all that time on it and we all _agreed_..." and, on analysis, it turns out that it was quite a while ago and many of the "all" are no longer there, the procedure had remained in place only because nobody challenged it... and the hard work of building consensus starts all over again with a different cast of characters.
But in a company, the arrival of newcomers is infrequent, structured, and the newcomers undergo some kind of formal or informal process of becoming oriented.
There's also a regression-to-the-mean-like effect. When an article is relatively undeveloped, and a random newcomer wanders in and decides to "edit this page," the chances of improvement are high. Not only because the average quality of the editors is higher than the quality of the page, but also because theor motivation is likely to be relatively pure. The main reason for wanting to edit a _low-quality_ page is that one actually knows something about the subject.
But when an article is of high quality, the people who have knowledge in the topic area are likely to leave it alone. The people who are most likely to edit it are people who want to push a point of view, or people who know much less than they think they know. The result is that the better an article is, the greater the chances that random edits will lower its quality.
I think there needs to be some mechanism in place so that when an article becomes generally regarded as good, Version 1.0 or whatever, it can be sort of locked in place. Perhaps it could be stamped with a version number, and any attempts to edit [[GoodArticle]] are automatically redirected to [[GoodArticle/Version1.1]]. Within a discussion forum, when and only when there is general consensus that [[GoodArticle/Version1.1]] is better than [[GoodArticle]], a sysop or suitably-authorized-panjandrum can move it to [[GoodArticle]].
-- Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith@verizon.net "Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print! Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/