On 10/10/05, slimvirgin(a)gmail.com <slimvirgin(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 10/10/05, uninvited(a)nerstrand.net
<uninvited(a)nerstrand.net> wrote:
The problem is that people come along and make
incremental changes each
of which, taken alone, is unremarkable -- neither helpful nor
especially detrimental to the article. In aggregate, such changes
destroy the organization of the article and compromise any stylistic
unity that may be present.
Such changes should really be reverted when they are made, with a kind
note offered to the other editor.
But Responsible Wikipedians Don't Revert Changes.
We have a culture of egalitarianism and a culture where reverting
changes is strongly discouraged.
Right, this is a real problem. We've got an RfC going at the moment
about an editor accused of reverting too much, when what he was doing
was trying to preserve halfway-decent writing, and one of the people
who has commented here in praise of good writing has criticized this
editor in the RfC for reverting too much, which strikes me as somewhat
contradictory.
What are we supposed to do when editors cause the writing in an
article to deteriorate, if not revert? Are a bunch of people who care
about good writing supposed to be on hand constantly to carefully tidy
up after others, just so that we can avoid wholesale reverting? It
simply isn't realistic to expect that. The fact is that lots of
editors add material that is badly written, badly sourced, unsourced,
and wrong -- and reverting, including repeatedly reverting, is
sometimes the only practical way to keep the page reasonably
encyclopedic looking.
Slimvirgin's points are well founded, and that's why the 3RR is
problematic - at just six edits, it freezes the relationship between
the two parties, forcing an artifical stalemate with no real incentive
for compromise.
In fact, more often, the 24 hour ban is employed, causing even more
rancor and bad feelings for one party. That 3RR is not an entitlement,
but an electric fence, brings problems too - it's used inconsistently
and extends banning to a whole class of editors that had never been
subject to it before. It's the [[Taser]] of Wikipedia, with many of
the pitfalls of the supposed 'non-lethal' weapon.
But there is an elegant solution somewhere between protecting an
article (too rigid) and article rating (too complex) - every article
can have a marker indicating the last-agree-upon-version. Anyone can
change the marker to point to a particular version in the edit
history, in wiki fashion. In effect, it would be the version that "the
crowd" considers the most acceptable one, while editing, sparring,
major revisions are happening on the 'current' one. If there is
consensus that it is generally good, the marker can be moved upon
every edit to be the current one. Or if overhauling is being done, the
marker can be kept back to an older rev while issues are ironed out.
(It removes the angst of having your edits "winning" and being in the
current version, and removes much of the 3RR angst.)
The marker system is easy to understand, straightforward to implement,
minimally impacts current working methods, does not require agreed
upon metric values, and is inherently wiki.
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)