On 9/24/07, louis bodo louis_bodo@yahoo.fr wrote:
Quality means reliability.
Somebody earlier compared the WP quality with that of a commercial article, such as a motor car. Because WP supplies INFORMATION the two are quite different. Here, though interesting, spelling mistake free, grammatically correct writing is important, I believe that RELIABILITY is the most important aspect, which means: most up to date correct statements without bias, without advertising, without spam, and of course without vandalised parts
I agree completely. Business "quality" initiatives (six sigma, etc.) don't really apply as there's not a set of procedures that one can improve for actually writing an article. Trying to nail down an actual procedure for creating a "quality" article is antithetical to the wiki process.
My only worry is, that not just checking, but patrolling sometimes inordinately long articles which, in number now exceed two millions in enwiki, and growing, and all this on a shoestring will be a daunting task.
I think what people are getting stuck on was the phrase "limited subset of users" who would be able to tag articles. In deeper discussions, it's been said that the "bar" for entry into this subset of users is to be set quite low, so that most regular editors would have the ability to tag article revisions. I would think that most recent changes patrollers would have already met the qualifications.
Also, if an article which has a tagged revision is then improved by a new or anonymous editor, if nobody happens to see that improvement on recent changes to validate the edit, it's not such a big deal. It will eventually be vandalized or improved again soon enough, and at that point it would come up for another review on the recent changes list. A few days without the most recent improvements being shown is not such a big deal to most articles -- especially since articles where it *might* be a big deal are already more heavily watched (current events, BLPs, etc.), and I'm also sure that a sub-culture of "tagged articles" patrolling will also arise, with volunteers clearing out the oldest backlog of articles with both a tagged revision and pending untagged changes.
--Darkwind (en.wp)