*I would have bought the 'not finished yet' argument 5 years ago. Perhaps even 3 years ago. But now? Every article in my area of expertise has stagnated.* <SNIP> *All I am saying is that there is a serious and growing problem and that someone needs to recognise it for what it is.*
The problem you mention is actually the stagnation of edits. Any article that has some common public interest will be read and corrected by many people, which will generally be good for its quality. Sure, more interested people will equally mean a larger share of vandals and nonsensical edits, but a fairly small group of productive editors can keep a much larger group of vandals at bay without to much effort; Huggle is a proof of concept for this, since only a handful of editors are required to keep out most of the obvious vandalism.
However, in cases where an article stagnates lower quality edits may go unnoticed for a longer time. Take our article's on faily unimportant secondary schools for example - most people interested in these article's are students and teachers of that institution, which means that the quality of the edits is likely to be fairly low (Students add themselves or attack the school, while teachers try to promote the school). Hence, the existence article was edited about 500 times in 3 years, which means that fairly little people are correcting changes or adding content. As a result it is more prone to degeneration then an article that is edited several thousands of times. More attention is better - even an edit war can be a good thing in this context, since both sides of the issue will try as hard as possible to keep their prefered version, eventually balancing the article into a version which adheres admirably to a neutral point of view.
*But as someone else noted, it's like when a politician publicly helps a needy family for the sake of the newspapers, leaving millions of other needy families in a needy state. That's how I feel about fixing Wikipedia entries.*
That is of course one way to view it - but i would argue that the politician example (hopefully) isn't accurate as it would suggest that people only edit in case they receive a personal benefit. Personally i hope that most people edit and improve for less selfish reasons. Or to phrase it as another comparison: A singular brick cannot build a house, and as of such people may deem carrying one futile, since would have to carry many times many bricks in order to build anything useful (Let alone fight decay). Yet if thousands of people carrying a single brick they can build a castle. There are many problems in the world, but is the amount a reason to say that fixing one of them is futile, just because there are many others?
~Excirial.
On Sun, Aug 29, 2010 at 7:42 PM, Peter Damian peter.damian@btinternet.comwrote:
Unfortunately, credentialism doesn't work.
And I wasn't suggesting it would.
Embarrassing Wikipedia in blog posts seems to work, one factoid at a
time
Well I hope so. However when I wrote this
http://ocham.blogspot.com/2010/06/william-of-ockham.html
The only correction was to remove the plagiarised material and one eccentric section and slap a template on the article. And that was only because I personally knew the guy who made the correction. And the problem I noted in the post here http://ocham.blogspot.com/2010/07/truth-versus-equality.html 'the puppet Turkish administration' is still there. I expect someone from here will fix it now. But as someone else noted, it's like when a politician publicly helps a needy family for the sake of the newspapers, leaving millions of other needy families in a needy state. That's how I feel about fixing Wikipedia entries.
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