Stan, I tend to agree there is a (perhaps misplaced) sense of urgency about having to "mop up" quickly, list things on VfD, etc. Some of it might be arrogance or nastiness.
But I'd like to offer another interpretation - there is no confidence these suspicious edits will be found or caught later. And that can bug certain types of people. Of all the mechanisms Wikipedia has for tracking changes and edits, perhaps the weakest is how to allow new entires to linger for a specified period and grow, and then come back to evaluate later. For many, "check it later" means "check it never."
I guess this could be cast as a finer grain interpretation of inclusionism and deletionism.
Absolute inclusionist - any and everything should be in Wikipedia Optimistic inclusionist - maybe not good now, but it may be, keep and check back later Pessimistic deletionist - may be good sometime, but delete it now, and keep only when good Absolute deletionist - it's not "encyclopediac", get rid of it
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)
On Tue, 24 Aug 2004 17:45:08 -0700, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
Daniel P.B.Smith wrote:
[...]
Who cares if there's a page up for a month or so lauding the wonders of the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center? These article all fall squarely in the "borderline" category. Get them cleaned up, but we don't need to drop everything and do it right away.
This should be tattooed on the back of each hand of every Wikipedian, so it's visible while typing. :-)
Going by comments I've seen, I think it feeds some people's egos to believe that they're saving WP's reputation from certain doom by quick listing of obscure articles on VfD - but WP's reputation is really made or broken by the quality of content in the articles of general interest, since those are the ones that readers find.
Another thing that I see is a sense of urgency, as if all the editing is going to come to a stop in 24 hours, and everything needs to be perfect by then. Even some oldtimers seem to act as if they don't really believe WP will be around next year, the year after, and the year after that. (It will, right? :-) )
Stan
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