Date: Sun, 9 Apr 2006 23:10:24 -0400

Huh? I thought that we had pretty much accepted that the general trend for high-profile, highly edited articles is that as time passes they tend to become higher quality. The often incredible improvement for front page featured articles is proof enough of this. Do you have a particular example in mind of this deterioration effect?

I'm afraid I don't, not at hand, but one phenomenon I've noticed and am going to make a point of documenting the next time it occurs is that there is a significant tendency for references to be lost over time. I notice it because I try to be fairly punctilious about providing them, and in several cases when reviewing articles I put significant work into, say, a year ago, I find that treferences have been lost.

Given the inability to perform a text search through histories, it is sometimes fairly laborious to find them again. On the other hand, a Google search on anything that's been in Wikipedia for more than about six months is apt to turn up, overwhelmingly, WIkipedia and mirrors as the first few pages of hits. I believe, but I cannot prove, that Web sources quoted in Wikipedia, that _still exist,_ sometimes fail to show at all in Google searches if they are small and insignificant sites and there are hundreds of bigger ones (Wikipedia and mirrors).

As I say, I don't have an example to point to, but I'll make a point of doing so when I find one.

The edit history usually shows that what seems to be happening is very sloppy editing, particular in rewriting or restructuring parts of articles. Sometimes people will remove a sentence they think is wrong and inadvertently remove an adjacent reference. Sometimes people remove an item but not the reference that supports it. Sometimes people remove a reference but not the item it supports. Sometimes people remove an item and its reference, then later someone reinserts the item but fails to reinsert the reference...