Doing it part by part is certainly OK, as long as it gets done;,
though I wouldn't oppose an effort to mark such text if a bot could do
it. what is not OK is the attitude that if we have poor sources, we
should leave them alone.
Certainly we need new articles; they are likely to be of a higher
standard if the existing articles are of a higher standard also. And
the tightening up of articles that Charles mentions below has a
strong tendency to remove old text from the EB, and certainly from the
old CE, which has an unmistakable florid style.
The attitude I really protest against is when people defend the
keeping of superseded sources instead of modern ones, even when good
ones are proposed, or naively use such sources to add to existing
articles. I regard the start of a new article by carrying over old EB
text just like I would from a web home page that happened to be
PD--the text is equally unlikely to be suitable for an encyclopedia.
On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 5:47 AM, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote:
"David Goodman" wrote
My view is that it would be a good idea to find all such text and
remove it, replacing it by something modern.
It is actually more wiki-like to proceed piecemeal, editing old encyclopedia text into
shape in numerous passes. There is certainly a serious process of "digestion" to
be done. My experience of the typical old article - say a biography - is that the basic
steps are
- create sections and address logical flow;
- tighten up where verbose (a common issue for old material);
- correct obvious POV;
- use more contemporary language.
This gives a good base. Then, if possible, update quite lightly - a recent book as
reference, some links to contemporary scholarship. The combined effect is usually to give
an acceptable article.
For reasons of scale - there are thousands upon thousands of missing topics for which an
acceptable article is what is required first - I'm an eventualist about replacing the
old stuff. And as usual, one should remember that creating an article that is well linked
in to the rest of WP promotes people's interest, leading to others working on the
text.
Charles
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David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG