On Jan 25, 2007, at 2:51 PM, Stan Shebs wrote:
Phil Sandifer wrote:
If Susan can make the edit from memory, we're
good. But if Susan has
to go Google the fact to find it somewhere else, we're already losing
precious seconds of Susan's time.
But how does that work out overall, when you save seconds of Susan's
time, and cost me a half-hour of research to figure out why an article
is inconsistent with all the ones it links with? Scholarship is tricky
enough on its own, we don't need to make it harder by mixing in a
bunch
of random half-remembered bits.
Simple. You're a different kind of editor than Susan. You're willing
to put long hours into Wikipedia. You care enough to join a mailing
list about Wikipedia. Accordingly, it's not the end of the world for
you to spend half an hour on a task like this. Because (and this is
important) most of the time it won't be wrong. Susan may not be 100%
reliable, but she's pretty good. How do we know this? Because she
wrote most of Wikipedia, and Wikipedia is pretty good.
In the areas I'm familiar with, that's not really how the numbers work.
There are lots of articles that I pass across, say "hmm, whole section
is probably bogus", but I don't have the time or energy to do anything
about it. In fact, it gets so tiresome I rarely even bother to note down
the need for factchecking anymore. My time isn't so worthless that I'm
willing to spend all of it perpetually cleaning up after the drivebys.
Stan