On 10/8/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
It disappoints me to hear a Wikipedian take this attitude towards quality. "So what?" So -- we're trying to be better than this, that's what.
Well, I'm all for aspiration, but I think in practice we cannot honestly suspect that people will not be able to find spotty articles when they want to. Even in publications with professionally trained, full-time editors this is a major problem (I say this as someone who in a previous life worked in a number of publishing and fact-checking jobs). In a situation where one is relying upon the volunteer and usually amateur labor of thousands of editors... it seems unavoidable. But of course that is just my gut sense of it.
I don't mean this to sound pessimistic. I think Wikipedia will always have a great many articles of very high quality. But I also think it will also have a great many articles of poor quality. This in no means should sound either discouraging or discouraged. I just think it's a fact of how a project of this sort will work in practice and I think it will be a constant tension. But let's not forget that tensions can be productive! The reason many editors (myself being one of them) got hooked on Wikipedia in the first place was discovering a sub-par article on something they knew about and, instead of writing off the whole idea, said "I can fix this!" and just never stopped.
I don't think this is what our general response to this sort of complaint should be. I think our response should be: hey, you know what, he's right! These articles ought to be pretty decent, but they aren't. Why? What can we do to improve?
If we study it up one side and down the other and conclude that there is nothing to be done about it, then fine. But we should not just accept the current state of affairs if there are sensible proposals for improvement.
Well, I admit to making two major assumptions: 1. that the reason there will be spotty places like this is because of the wiki model itself and 2. that the wiki model has many other benefits and I wouldn't want to change it very much. You might be right in questioning my assumptions in the first case -- that this isn't something inherent to the model. It may of course be that my version of "the wiki model" is different than yours but I suspect it is not that different.
I don't have a problem with eventualism -- but 'eventualism' is not the same as saying "so what?" to quality problems.
Okay, I agree with that. My "so what?" was only to the fact that Wikipedia sometimes has spotty content. I do somewhat suspect this is going to be inherent to the project -- at any given moment, there might be things which need work. But I could be very wrong on that, of course, and hopefully I am!
I don't think there's a massive "quality" problem that isn't to be expected from a system of this sort. I think the fact that there is some very high-quality work is proof enough that this system doesn't *necessarily* lead to poor or spotty content, which is what most of these critics generally seem to be implying.
It would be interesting, as a fact-finding exercise, for someone to sit down with the histories of these two articles as well as the histories of two featured articles and look at what the patterns of editing were and see if any generalizable conclusions could be drawn. I'm not sure if it would give any actionable policy, but could at least reduce the armchair philosophizing (which I'm of course always happy to take part in, being somewhat of a pedant).
FF