There are lots of good points in this thread, both for and against
edit wars (generally speaking), but unfortunatly this is a spin off of
something as open as wikipedia. It seems to be mainly humanities
subjects that have this problem, in the analogy of 'one persons
terrorist is another persons freedomfighter'.
Wikipedia is a great resourse for science and technical materials
because most of this information is 'fact'. There is no doubting the
Cosine rule for example (there probrably is in advanced mathematics,
but generally), but an article on a religion will always incure
differences of opinion or sabotage. This has been true throughout
history and I feel the only way to prevent it on wikipedia would to
either ban the topic or to freeze a version of it (which defeats the
whole point of wikipedia).
As a step forward it may be interesting to create an 'edit relevance'
limit which can be set by a moderator. It would cut out a lot of
random things like 'I like pizza' from articles and may help. Another
idea may be incurring some sort of time limit - If an article has been
stable for a long time and then edited, the edit is reviewed by a
moderator as to see if it was worth it. These are just ideas, feel
free for C&C.
Just my thoughts.
Regards,
On Sun, 10 Oct 2004 17:00:15 +0100, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote:
"JAY JG" .
I think a number of experienced editors here are
telling you the exact
opposite; that they "deal with it" by giving up.
Yes, but it only takes one who does take an interest. There is always
plenty to do and edit on WP - let's not assume that that's a _failure_ of
the project.
>'A mass of overlapping articles' is indeed a probable consequence of two
or
>more sides to an argument backing up their
cases: this is intrisically a
>Good Thing, in that one can get behind strongly-held beliefs to some of
the
>grounds. A case I was looking at today is
[[loop quantum gravity]]; where
>WP
>is getting the benefit of some expert contributions, though not in the
most
>finished or useable form. The merge options
are a little tricky here
(and
are surely
more so in other cases); but typicallly are mostly about skill
as
an editor.
It is intrinsically a Bad Thing if it persists; we get to the state where
Wikipedia cannot be trusted because it simultaneously (and often
vociferously) asserts all sorts of contradictory things, and no-one
actually
knows where to look for information, because the
articles (as stated) all
overlap. It also makes the maintenance effort grow exponentially.
OK, it can get to be a muddle. I don't spend much time on this kind of
contention myself. I _have_ spent a great deal of time on listing and
categorising areas, and that tends towards reducing duplication and
improving navigation.
>Finally, time consumption. Undeniable that
responsible Wikipedians
>watching
>contentious areas do have to put in the hours. Perhaps creating new
>content
>would get more recognition. It is, though, rapid to revert; the bias is
in
>favour of sustaining the status quo if
that's the object.
Hmm. I've personally been criticized quite
strongly and regularly for
reverting to the status quo; maybe the bias in your mind is not that of
others.
Well, sometimes it's the right thing to do. Not always.
Charles
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