Steve Bennett wrote:
On 5/21/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net>
wrote:
Get rid of the culture of fear where an editor
avoids being bold to
avoid arguments.
Yes. The trouble is, edit wars have an effect far wider than just the
article where they take place. Peopel hear about them, and expect to run
into them everywhere. The fact is, in the various random topics I've edited,
I've only ever hit two edit wars. Occasionally people revert changes, but
usually in good faith - the changes were simply incorrect.
OK, sometimes it is a bit like judging the English by the behaviour of
its soccer fans. It makes you shy about being near any of them.
On the other hand, I very, very frequently break up
unstructured articles
into sections, wikify, or rearrange sections into some kind of order - the
very basic sort of editing that anyone can do, but that people seem afraid
to? It's actually really trivial to read an article paragraph by paragraph
and add a ==section heading== before each one summarising what it's about,
and it's so helpful. Once that's done you can actually begin to see the
article as whole and see what's missing, rather than just seeing that
there's lots of text, and maybe it has enough text?
Some editors don't like to do work that's "really trivial";
it's
inconsistent with their self-image. ;-)
I agree with the importance of what you say. It still involves building
a culture that values the need to wash dishes once in a while. It's
tough doing that when heretofore they took it for granted that mom would
always do that.
Ec