[Foundation-l] breaking English Wikipedia apart

[Andre Engels]

I may sound negative, as said, I know much has been tried, and little
succeeded. I do really hope this does work, and am well willing to
think along to try to make it that way. In fact, it is not that far
from ideas that I have developed myself or with other users on IRC as
well - although I was putting my emphasis a bit differently - on
neutrality and expertise rather than editing quality as such (the two
do of course overlap, neutrality and correctedness are important parts
of good editing, and writing good articles would in my scheme be the
major evidence of expertise, but there are important differences as
well, for example in that expertise is much more subject-dependent
than editing quality).

Still, apart from being afraid it all will not be successful (but at
least it's worth a try), I do see some problems. One problem is still
at the entrance. I don't see your community of 3000 users come about -
although that may have to do with me not being from the English but
the Dutch Wikipedia. There's two possibilities - either the good
editor title is seen as not much at all, and many good editors won't
bother trying to get it, or it _is_ seen as a great deal, and then
there will be less (but still a substantial number) in that camp, but
added to that there will be those who don't want it because of the
responsibility that comes, and others that are more looking for the
prestige than for the good editing that it comes with.

To explain a bit more of my skepticism, let me tell you the following anecdote:

Once I found on my user talk page a call from someone, who asked me to
let my neutral eye go over an article with a fierce content dispute.
Although I was a bit hesitant at first, after a little prodding I
agreed. I went to the university library to read about the subject of
the article, and that gave me a rather good idea what was going on.
One of the main contenders (let's call him A and his opponent B) was
basically adding original research - his edits were not backed by
literature, not even by the source he did provide for his edit. I
wrote this, proposed a toning down and shortening of his material, and
proposed some improvements in other parts of the article. I discussed
a bit with A, B and others in the days following, but soon A and B
were throwing personal attacks at each other again, and I left in
disgust. Maybe I could have done better. Maybe not. Still, being
recognized as a good editor in the end did not help me in resolving
this conflict - at best it stopped me from being the target of the mud
being flown around. In the end, A got a long-term block - not for POV
editing, not for doing original research, not for misrepresenting his
sources - he could have gone on with all those without strong
consequences. But he made the mistake of making repeated personal
attacks on his opponents. If not, the article might well still be
locked today.



-- 
André Engels, andreengels at gmail.com