Here's a question which has been (to my mind, at least) raised by the recent Fleshlight debate...
...should Wikipedia keep articles which the community is unwilling to maintain?
I haven't checked that article's history, so I don't know if it was in that class or not, but examples certainly exist. There's plenty of articles which are festering cesspits, one or two pathological editors warring over them, and no-one trying (or caring) to "make it good". Many of these, if taken to AFD, will survive with a "notable topic, keep, cleanup", and the situation will return to the status-quo, with the vague possibility that One Day a good and hard-working editor will come along and adopt it.
Is this sort of thing a net gain or a net loss for the encyclopedia? Thoughts appreciated.
Andrew Gray wrote:
Is this sort of thing a net gain or a net loss for the encyclopedia? Thoughts appreciated.
The problem with deletion is the difficulty of keeping them when they're restarted, due to recreation worries and folks quick on the trigger. Truly, the best case scenario (and one I may start doing myself in the meantime) is to make it a point, when finishing discussions on such articles, to stub them to something readable and manageable. That way, the information is there to be expanded upon, and it doesn't look like a mess.
-Jeff
On 10/10/06, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
There's plenty of articles which are festering cesspits, one or two pathological editors warring over them, and no-one trying (or caring) to "make it good".
The benefit of having an article to read will always outweigh the problem of it putting a slight strain on Wikipedia. I think one can always find some willing editor to come along and fix an article (do something to it at least). It's just a matter of improving our mechanisms of sorting out POV-pushers and of article improvement.
On 10/10/06, Oldak Quill oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/10/06, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
There's plenty of articles which are festering cesspits, one or two pathological editors warring over them, and no-one trying (or caring) to "make it good".
The benefit of having an article to read will always outweigh the problem of it putting a slight strain on Wikipedia. I think one can always find some willing editor to come along and fix an article (do something to it at least).
if something = shove yet another cleanup tag on it maybe otherwise no.
It's just a matter of improving our mechanisms of sorting out POV-pushers and of article improvement. -- Oldak Quill (oldakquill@gmail.com) _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Andrew Gray wrote:
Here's a question which has been (to my mind, at least) raised by the recent Fleshlight debate...
...should Wikipedia keep articles which the community is unwilling to maintain?
I just read an interesting thread on Usenet where someone "tested" Wikipedia by going back to articles in his area of expertise that he'd worked on six months ago and checking to see whether they'd improved, remained the same, or degraded in quality since then. (message ID 1160450561.103548.50770@c28g2000cwb.googlegroups.com if anyone's interested). It was an impromptu "study", but he made a pretty good case suggesting that the article on [[Leon Trotsky]] had degraded significantly since he'd worked on it; in particular it was apparently targeted by [[User:Wumbo]], a subtle vandal who carefully inserted false information that still hadn't been cleaned out despite being exposed as a vandal months ago based on his work on other articles.
Is [[Leon Trotsky]] less maintainable than [[Fleshlight]], and should we therefore get rid of it?
I'm wondering if the long-promised version-marking system will help, once it's finally activated. It could go a long way toward helping us identify which articles might be in need of maintenance and which have had at least some degree of checking done on them.
--- Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
I'm wondering if the long-promised version-marking system will help, once it's finally activated. It could go a long way toward helping us identify which articles might be in need of maintenance and which have had at least some degree of checking done on them.
*nod* It will be a bit of a culture change; people will start to review the history of an article more before editing for fear of getting their edits reverted along with vandalism/POV previously put in since the last checked version. Users will certainly do a bit of checking before they state their reputation in the community by saying an article is 'free of vandalism' or has 'been reviewed'. Thus the idea of checked snapshots is great.
I think this will be a good change.
-- mav
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On Tue, 10 Oct 2006 21:02:54 +0100, "Andrew Gray" shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
should Wikipedia keep articles which the community is unwilling to maintain?
For what value of "the community"?
Guy (JzG)
Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
"Andrew Gray" shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
should Wikipedia keep articles which the community is unwilling to maintain?
For what value of "the community"?
"Unwilling" is still open to interpretation. Failure to maintain does not imply unwillingness.
Ec