"Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" <jwales(a)wikia.com> writes:
It's the wiki way. Having the ability to edit
what other people write
gives rise to a culture of co-operation rather than confrontation.
That's how things ought to work for article text. "Signed" posts on
talk pages are different. At least, if you edit someone's post on a
talk page, make sure to remove the signature (this --~~~~ marker
resp. its expansion).
We don't have a strong culture of refactoring, but
it is traditional
in a wiki to refactor discussions, which means, for someone to come
through and take a large discussion and neutrally summarize what it
was all about. Everything is in the edit history, and of course
people can refactor the refactoring.
Yes, in general it works this way. Unfortunately, that's not the truth
if people "rename" or "join" articles; this basically often means to
delete an article and its edit history. Recently I tracked down such a
case on the German WP:
1/ In January 2003 [[de:Konrad Witz]] was created - by me,
accidentally.
2/ During the next two years some 10 edits took place without
enhancing it remarkable.
3/ In February 2005 an IP user created a badly written article
(babelfish?) with the name [[de:Conrad Witz]]; it is longer and
offers more "facts".
4/ Some days later a WP admin moved away the old "Konrad Witz"
article with the intend to rename [[de:Conrad Witz]] to
[[de:Konrad Witz]].
ATM, "Konrad Witz" sit in the "trash" area waiting deletion.
5/ Some copied a sentence from the old article and basically written
in 2003 to the new one - without a proper checkin message; now
it looks as if this sentence was written in 2005.
Looking at the current edit history of [[de:Konrad Witz]] you will
believe, info on "Konrad Witz" was missing in the German WP up til
February 2005. Similar "accidents" happen all the time and as time goes
by, edit histories lie more and more.
I will publish this message as
[[en:User:Keichwa/Everything Is In the Edit History]]
--
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