Its simply naive to say that infinite edits means an infinitely good article. If you dont believe that bad, non-vandalism edits take their toll on articles, I invite you to look at the Featured article review. So many articles are ruined by people who simply aren't good at writing prose, and who enjoy adding useless factoids. Articles quite often get worse-- if your idealism has you believing otherwise, please look at this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hip_hop_music&diff=41510779&am...
This should be a big wakeup call to anyone who thinks that the pure wiki system allows articles to get better indefinitely. Unless we do something about it, wikipedia will simply be a place where articles get great then start to deteriorate. I'm not suggesting stable versions, but surely... something needs to be done.
On 4/11/06, Ben Greenberg bengreenb@hotmail.com wrote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hip_hop_music&diff=41510779&am...
Can you guide us through this one? I see lots of small positive changes (and some less good ones), and some big slabs of text coming and going, but I can't immediately say which is better.
This should be a big wakeup call to anyone who thinks that the pure wiki system allows articles to get better indefinitely. Unless we do something about it, wikipedia will simply be a place where articles get great then start to deteriorate. I'm not suggesting stable versions, but surely... something needs to be done.
I don't think they "get better then deteoriorate", I would say they get better then plateau. How could this Hip Hop article actually be any better?
Steve
Ben Greenberg wrote:
Its simply naive to say that infinite edits means an infinitely good article. If you dont believe that bad, non-vandalism edits take their toll on articles, I invite you to look at the Featured article review. So many articles are ruined by people who simply aren't good at writing prose, and who enjoy adding useless factoids. Articles quite often get worse-- if your idealism has you believing otherwise, please look at this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hip_hop_music&diff=41510779&am...
This should be a big wakeup call to anyone who thinks that the pure wiki system allows articles to get better indefinitely. Unless we do something about it, wikipedia will simply be a place where articles get great then start to deteriorate. I'm not suggesting stable versions, but surely... something needs to be done.
I tend to agree. One email that I remember handling on OTRS was someone saying that they'd accidentally blanked one section of an article and severely shortened another; the blanking had gone unnoticed for three weeks before I fixed it.
On 4/11/06, Ben Greenberg bengreenb@hotmail.com wrote:
Its simply naive to say that infinite edits means an infinitely good article. If you dont believe that bad, non-vandalism edits take their toll on articles, I invite you to look at the Featured article review. So many articles are ruined by people who simply aren't good at writing prose, and who enjoy adding useless factoids. Articles quite often get worse-- if your idealism has you believing otherwise, please look at this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hip_hop_music&diff=41510779&am...
A clearer example would be [[Omnipotence paradox]]:
The version that was featured: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Omnipotence_paradox&oldid=3946... After two and a half months, 500 edits, and being on the front page: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Omnipotence_paradox&oldid=3943...
The "popular culture" section has grown and acquired a gratuitous non-free image, while the entire rest of the discussion has been reduced to stray paragraphs and a few brief lists.
-- Mark [[User:Carnildo]]
I've wondered what the best way is to deal with this sort of thing. One might be to make FA status awarded to specific versions of the article in a more direct way -- i.e. the FA template on the talk page could link directly to the version which was voted to be featured, to make comparisons with the current article easier.
Another is a better way of detecting bad edits. I've seen a lot of really bad content sneak into high-visibility and highly-watched articles because of the following pattern:
1. Editor X vandalizes an article once 2. Editor Y vandalizes the article three times 3. Admin Z reverts Editor Y, does not look at the edit of Editor X
This is especially prevalent when there is a small spate of vandalism. I try to make sure I always check the current version against something further down the page, but it's hard to remember to do in all cases. Perhaps if it was easier (i.e., with a single click and without any looking at the history) to see the diff for the edits done by the most recent five users (sorting it by user rather than edit would make it easier to avoid skipping single bad edits)? Maybe if there was a regularized system of evaluating many edits at a time and screening them for problematic content? Maybe we need to find ways to get around seeing histories as collections of single edits and rather as clusters of edits? I don't exactly know. I'm just speculating wildly here and not proposing anything concrete.
I don't think anyone thinks the wiki system is flawless in any respect, or that infinite edits means an infinitely good article. There are benefits and detriments, and a good working-philosophy is to try and focus on ways in which can -- utilizing social, technological, and other approaches -- try and boost the strengths of the positive aspects and get around the negative ones. It's no more destined to succeed than it is doomed to fail.
FF
On 4/11/06, Ben Greenberg bengreenb@hotmail.com wrote:
Its simply naive to say that infinite edits means an infinitely good article. If you dont believe that bad, non-vandalism edits take their toll on articles, I invite you to look at the Featured article review. So many articles are ruined by people who simply aren't good at writing prose, and who enjoy adding useless factoids. Articles quite often get worse-- if your idealism has you believing otherwise, please look at this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hip_hop_music&diff=41510779&am...
This should be a big wakeup call to anyone who thinks that the pure wiki system allows articles to get better indefinitely. Unless we do something about it, wikipedia will simply be a place where articles get great then start to deteriorate. I'm not suggesting stable versions, but surely... something needs to be done.
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On 4/12/06, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
I've wondered what the best way is to deal with this sort of thing. One might be to make FA status awarded to specific versions of the article in a more direct way -- i.e. the FA template on the talk page could link directly to the version which was voted to be featured, to make comparisons with the current article easier.
Another is a better way of detecting bad edits. I've seen a lot of really bad content sneak into high-visibility and highly-watched articles because of the following pattern:
- Editor X vandalizes an article once
- Editor Y vandalizes the article three times
- Admin Z reverts Editor Y, does not look at the edit of Editor X
This is especially prevalent when there is a small spate of vandalism. I try to make sure I always check the current version against something further down the page, but it's hard to remember to do in all cases. Perhaps if it was easier (i.e., with a single click and without any looking at the history) to see the diff for the edits done by the most recent five users (sorting it by user rather than edit would make it easier to avoid skipping single bad edits)? Maybe if there was a regularized system of evaluating many edits at a time and screening them for problematic content? Maybe we need to find ways to get around seeing histories as collections of single edits and rather as clusters of edits? I don't exactly know. I'm just speculating wildly here and not proposing anything concrete.
I don't think anyone thinks the wiki system is flawless in any respect, or that infinite edits means an infinitely good article. There are benefits and detriments, and a good working-philosophy is to try and focus on ways in which can -- utilizing social, technological, and other approaches -- try and boost the strengths of the positive aspects and get around the negative ones. It's no more destined to succeed than it is doomed to fail.
FF
That would work well with patrolled edits- one could then check back to the last patrolled edit, and then if all the subsequent changes were good, mark them all as patrolled. Of course, we'd need patrolled edits in the first place.
~maru
On 4/12/06, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
This is especially prevalent when there is a small spate of vandalism. I try to make sure I always check the current version against something further down the page, but it's hard to remember to do in all cases. Perhaps if it was easier (i.e., with a single click and without any looking at the history) to see the diff for the edits done by the most recent five users (sorting it by user rather than edit would make it easier to avoid skipping single bad edits)? Maybe if there was a regularized system of evaluating many edits at a time and screening them for problematic content? Maybe we need to find ways to get around seeing histories as collections of single edits and rather as clusters of edits? I don't exactly know. I'm just speculating wildly here and not proposing anything concrete.
This is possible with my greasemonkey script. I will really try to release it properly. There's a screenshot here: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image%3AEnhanceHistory-ShowerJuggl...
Would that help?
Steve
On 4/12/06, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote: ...
This is possible with my greasemonkey script. I will really try to release it properly. There's a screenshot here: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image%3AEnhanceHistory-ShowerJuggl...
Would that help?
Steve
Steve, that is quite neat. When you do release, I'd love to try it out. (Assuming it works. I never got the Greasemonkey extension to animate histories to work, for instance. Wikipedia seems rather hostile to Greasemonkey extensions...)
~maru
On 4/12/06, maru dubshinki marudubshinki@gmail.com wrote:
Steve, that is quite neat. When you do release, I'd love to try it out. (Assuming it works. I never got the Greasemonkey extension to animate histories to work, for instance. Wikipedia seems rather hostile to Greasemonkey extensions...)
It's not at all. It's just that old Greasemonkey extensions are rather hostile to new versions of FireFox.
The major issue I've battled with in this particular extension is finding a good diff routine. I've now been through three:
1) One that worked relatively quickly, was pretty, but had bugs and frequently missed changes 2) One that worked very quickly, but diffed at the character level (I think that's shown in the screenshot). Often two completely different words would be considered "almost the same" with just individual characters changed. 3) One that worked as slow as all hell, was pretty, and sometimes crashed for unknown reasons (about 1 in 10 diffs failed to return anything).
So the options are: Fix the bugs in 1) (possible, others have already attempted this, I think) Make 2) work at word level (hard, IMHO) Fix the bug in 3) and just put up with its incredible slowness, and adapat the extension as a whole to show less diffs.
Steve