This is from a talk page of a featured article:
" Beyond which, this is an FA, and FA's really should be treated as more finalized and finished than general articles, as they have passed through a form of peer review and have a community endorsement in their present forms."
Is this view supported anywhere? Should I be more careful when editing a FA, since it should be supposed that the article is good as it is and does not need a change?
/habj
If you can improve it go right ahead, but frankly there are a number of former featured articles which have seriously deteriorated due to subsequent unprofessional edits.
Fred
On May 26, 2006, at 12:48 PM, habj wrote:
This is from a talk page of a featured article:
" Beyond which, this is an FA, and FA's really should be treated as more finalized and finished than general articles, as they have passed through a form of peer review and have a community endorsement in their present forms."
Is this view supported anywhere? Should I be more careful when editing a FA, since it should be supposed that the article is good as it is and does not need a change?
/habj _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On 5/26/06, Fred Bauder fredbaud@ctelco.net wrote:
If you can improve it go right ahead, but frankly there are a number of former featured articles which have seriously deteriorated due to subsequent unprofessional edits.
Fred
At the same time the standards for FAs have risen. A static FA would lose that status sooner or later.
On 5/26/06, Fred Bauder fredbaud@ctelco.net wrote:
frankly there are a number of former featured articles which have seriously deteriorated due to subsequent unprofessional edits.
In what ways deteriorated? A couple of examples would be great for the discussion.
Have new facts been added, in a way that is stylistically inferior to the rest of the article? That can be fixed. Have new facts been added that really need not be there? They can be removed, when someone decides to take an overall view of the article - most of the time when people add stuff in articles, they do not do that. Have important facts been removed? That is more troublesome, as it is more job to dig it out of the page history. If the article has in fact detoriorated - who has not someone dug the old, better version out and replaced the new one, or (probably preferrably) created an imbetween? unless really all of the new edits were 100% bad.
The better the article, the less chance that a given edit is an improvement but still - IMHO the wiki way in reality sometimes has to be four steps forward and three steps back. Not every edit will in itself be an improvement, but they might form the background to help someone else make the article better.
/habj
On 5/26/06, habj sweetadelaide@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/26/06, Fred Bauder fredbaud@ctelco.net wrote:
frankly there are a number of former featured articles which have seriously deteriorated due to subsequent unprofessional edits.
In what ways deteriorated? A couple of examples would be great for the discussion.
[[Omnipotence paradox]] The version that was featured (and that I reverted to after seeing what had been done to it: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Omnipotence_paradox&oldid=3946...
The version just before my revert: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Omnipotence_paradox&oldid=3943...
On 5/26/06, habj sweetadelaide@gmail.com wrote:
This is from a talk page of a featured article:
" Beyond which, this is an FA, and FA's really should be treated as more finalized and finished than general articles, as they have passed through a form of peer review and have a community endorsement in their present forms."
Is this view supported anywhere? Should I be more careful when editing a FA, since it should be supposed that the article is good as it is and does not need a change?
Yes, this is the general view. In particular, don't add unsourced statements to a fully sourced article, don't add spelling mistakes to a proofread article etc. I would like us to formalise this.
Steve
On May 26, 2006, at 6:44 PM, Steve Bennett wrote:
This is from a talk page of a featured article:
" Beyond which, this is an FA, and FA's really should be treated as more finalized and finished than general articles, as they have passed through a form of peer review and have a community endorsement in their present forms."
Is this view supported anywhere? Should I be more careful when editing a FA, since it should be supposed that the article is good as it is and does not need a change?
Yes, this is the general view. In particular, don't add unsourced statements to a fully sourced article, don't add spelling mistakes to a proofread article etc. I would like us to formalise this.
Featured articles should have guardians who fearlessly revert bad changes like this while taking useful contributions and massaging them into the featured whole. This would work a lot better than the salutory neglect system we employ now. I know this sounds ominously like WP:OWN, but it's needed.
Philip Welch wrote:
Featured articles should have guardians who fearlessly revert bad changes like this while taking useful contributions and massaging them into the featured whole. This would work a lot better than the salutory neglect system we employ now. I know this sounds ominously like WP:OWN, but it's needed.
This already unofficially happens, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. Some articles are indeed neglected, but there are many on which you can't change so much as a bit of wording without attracting attention.
WikiProjects and setting up "related changes" watchlists are one way some people try to organize such oversight. It seems to work pretty well in some areas, and not even just for featured articles---if you add a new page to any subcategory of [[Category:Mathematics]], you're likely to get someone stopping by within the next few hours to fiddle with some part of it or another. (But then we have some very good and diligent mathematics editors.)
-Mark
--- Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Yes, this is the general view. In particular, don't add unsourced statements to a fully sourced article, don't add spelling mistakes to a proofread article etc. I would like us to formalise this.
That really should not be the case for older FAs. I rewrote two of them because I feared they were prime delisting candidates. Oh, and those articles didn't degrade since listing; FA standards simply got a lot more rigorous since they were listed.
-- mav
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On 5/28/06, Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com wrote:
--- Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Yes, this is the general view. In particular, don't add unsourced statements to a fully sourced article, don't add spelling mistakes to a proofread article etc. I would like us to formalise this.
That really should not be the case for older FAs. I rewrote two of them because I feared they were prime delisting candidates. Oh, and those articles didn't degrade since listing; FA standards simply got a lot more rigorous since they were listed.
What should happen in this case is that those articles should be degraded to "A class" (see [[Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment]]). Hopefully this would cause less pain than the current featured/non featured demotion?
Steve