Not at all - I've got the sources, fortunately, to manage Gluck myself. And yes, my
first edits were painfully bad - I did quite a lot of damage, and could have done a hell
of a lot more if I hadn't, thankfully, been stopped in time by someone cleverer. At
least I was one of a large minority - I didn't have an agenda and wasn't here to
troll!
My point is that I was not encouraged to make those first edits - thank heaven Wikipedia
doesn't actually do much in the way of active encouragement in favour of editing - and
I should never have been allowed to in the first place. At least, not without a mandatory
guide to citing your sources, a registered account, and a stern lecture on the absolute
importance. As it is, I just plunged straight in with some garbage from that night's
magazine bought at the opera (thankfully a usable source, when someone taught me how to
cite things a few weeks later - and so easily I could have blundered around for months
more causing absolute mayhem, luckily I was caught by one of our finest - but so many do
wander around like lost souls, just adding their nationalist myths learned from
god-knows-where, with no inkling of what policy says. These are just the clueless ones -
they can learn - others need to learn with a sledgehammer). Our provision for newbies is
completely rotten - we just set them up for a massive biting. WMF-wide problem, I think.
CM
Odi profanum vulgus et arceo.
Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2007 18:14:07 +0000
From: chiesa.marco(a)gmail.com
To: foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] [EWW] Edit Wikipedia Week
Christiano Moreschi ha scritto:
This vulgar monstrosity got my blood boiling. Who
the hell thought this one up? Clearly, not someone who spends half their day fighting in
the dirty, blood-bespattered trenches of the never-ending Wikipedia-wars.
Look, the plain fact is that we don't want more people adding their own junk to the
English Wikipedia. Out of the 2 million articles there, under 5000 have got any sort of
quality control tag attached to them (FA, GA), and even those often have very severe
problems. 5000 out of 2 million? Is that anything to be proud of? The rest? God help us.
Even ostensibly decent-looking articles simply fall apart when any sort of critical
scrutiny is applied to them - the version of [[Johann Adolph Hasse]] copied over in whole
from 1911 Britannica may have looked quite nice, but Christ only knows how many goddamned
lies it contained until I rewrote the thing from scratch. Same with [[Gluck]], which
I'm currently having to do exactly the same with. More seriously, poke around in the
history of [[Russia]], a plausible-seeming piece of well-tuned nonsense, cobbled together
from an ultra-nationalist viewpoint from online encyclopaedias and newspapers, that
absolutely falls in on itself when even semi-expert eyes look at the beast. I could easily
cite perhaps a couple of million - quite literally - more examples of decent-looking
Wikipedia articles that are, in fact, absolute crap. Wikipedia, the encyclopaedia written
by the rabble, isn't working. Hell, I haven't even got on to the user conduct
problems - trying to maintain control over enwiki isn't a question of helping the
encyclopaedia along, it's a question of riot control while dodging the shit flung at
you from 3 sides. So what's the solution?
Well, I guess apart from Jimbo and a bunch of people we all started
editing Wikipedia because we heard about it somewhere.And I'm pretty
sure quite a few of us would look back at our early edits and say "Uhm
that was crap". And since, as you say, we have to deal with a lot of
crap, maybe it's a good idea to have more manpower. Do you want to
improve the entry about Gluck? Maybe it's a good idea to target some
student of History of Music, or some music society. And if you look at
the first edit of a random featured article, you have a good chance it
was crap or maybe a very short stub. Target people you think are likely
to make good contributions, and teach them how to edit, and we may end
up with a better encyclopaedia. Scare people off, you'll get read of
good contributors rather than vandals and trolls.
Cruccone
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