Andrew Lih wrote:
On 10/7/05, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
- 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