At 03:13 PM 5/23/2008, phoebe ayers wrote:

From personal experience with lots of nonfiction writing, I know that copyediting something to condense it -- to say the same thing in fewer and better-chosen words -- is quite difficult. But it seems like that's another aspect of quality we should really start focussing on more. A concise and precise article is a thing of beauty.

Spot on. Now, comes a writer and creates that thing of beauty, and it is concise and precise and all that. Took hours to boil it down to that. Oh, the writer didn't source it. The writer knew the subject very well and simply wrote about what the writer knows. And, the writer knows, anyone else who knows this subject will recognize the accuracy of this. I'm not talking about someone simply asserting their own POV.

Used to be, this article might sit there, unsourced for years. Nowadays, five minutes, speedy deletion tag. "Fails to assert notability." "No sources."

The ladder that built the project is being chopped away. There is possibly help coming: flagged revisions. Once we have a means of discriminating between checked and sourced and polished articles and those which are perhaps better called "submissions," we might be able to move beyond the whole deletionist/inclusionist madness. We might be able to stop stepping on the seeds that could be fostered and nourished with good editing. If we don't, somebody else will.