Rebecca wrote
With all respect to Andrew and Charles, I think
they're both missing the
point.
No one is disputing that there are many areas of Wikipedia that work
brilliantly, such as mathematics. Both these answers seem to be along
the lines of "well, lots of it works, so don't criticise it at all!"
The problem lies in the controversial articles. Saying "let them burn
out, and hope someone comes along to replace them" is a really, really
bad idea - both for the growth of Wikipedia (losing good contributors
who were making other contributions), and for the articles (they then
become unusably bad, without someone willing to fend off the
POVpushers).
Figures: around 360 articles marked as NPOV disputed, out of 360,000 on
Wikien. That's 0.1%.
With all due respect to Adam Carr, Zero and other good editors who engage in
the toughest areas: when I come across you guys, I say to myself '"that
inflexibility isn't the best way". You may be right much more often than
not - still, patience is a virtue, and burn out is waiting for those who
want it fixed this minute, not in the longer term.
I've suggested solutions, and so have numerous
others. Attacking the
messenger doesn't make our handling of controversial articles any less
problematic.
Have to take the community with you: that's the problem here.
Charles