On 03/01/80, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Using the example of your [[Education in Malaysia]] it's the kind of thing where you, as the original writer start with a vision of the article as a whole, but the deterioration comes from successive small edits which limit their focus on single phrases and sentences.
It's a cycle articles go through. A good writer (and good writers are a rarer commodity than people who happen to know something on a subject) goes through the article, cleans it up, gets it into really good and balanced shape. Then people come along and add more info and tweak sentences and so forth, and the article gets lumps and bumps and bulges and warts - but it does have more and better information than it did before. So it then needs the good writer to come back and do the difficult work of rebalancing it without removing the details. Which is work, but good writing is work.
I don't think that content arbitration boards are the solution. If that were a winning technique Nupedia would have been more successful.
I just can't see how they'd scale well. Though Citizendium is approaching this by subject-area fiefdoms for groups of editors. (On CZ, an "editor" has some editorial power; the people just writing stuff are "authors.") Maybe they can make it work for them. On Wikipedia, any area really needing content arbitration would I suspect be too embattled for it to do much lasting good.
- d.