[WikiEN-l] a valid criticism

[Jimmy Wales]

Andrew Lih wrote:
> On 10/7/05, Stan Shebs <shebs at apple.com> wrote:
>>2. We need a way to discourage well-meaning but less-able editors
>>from crumbling good articles. On my watchlist I see a lot of editors
>>(some logins, some anons) adding nonsequiturs or redundancies,
>>randomly rearranging text, adding useless templates en masse, etc.
>>They're not vandalism, but they're not improvements either, and
>>most of them I just let slide by because they're stylistic rather
>>than factual, and it's disheartening to argue with people about
>>style over and over. A vicious circle though, because if I feel
>>like an article is inexorably going downhill, I'm less and less
>>motivated to try to halt the slide. Not quite the same as article
>>rating, it seems more like we want articles to gradually get harder
>>to edit as they gradually get better.
> 
> This is a great point by Stan, and something Wikipedia has to figure
> out. At least for English WP, it's no longer predominantly growth
> mode; it has entered an important maintenance-heavy mode.

I know this is lame, but I just want to say "me too".  Stan's point is
great.

> We'd like to think that it's inevitable we'll asymptotically approach
> high quality, as Tony defended with [[Eventualism]]. But I think it's
> too simplistc. As Stan observed, many articles have been or are
> sliding backwards, and unfortunately the techniques to prevent the
> regression are generally frowned upon - abrupt rejections of changes
> from newbies, repeated reverts, protecting articles.
> 
> As we've moved from growth to maintaining the core set of articles
> that will be in "1.0", have we appropriately changed our expectations
> about community policies to get there?

I think that's exactly the right conversation for us to be having.

I'm a big fan of eventualism.  But Bill Gates and Jane Fonda are not new
articles, nor are they difficult or obscure subjects.  Nor are the
problems I'm _currently_ concerned about with these articles problems
resulting from a lack of knowledge.  They are stylistic problems which
are pretty awful.

--jimbo