[Foundation-l] Organization on Wikipedia that deals withcontent issues.

[Excirial]

*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 at btinternet.com>wrote:

> > 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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