Tony Sidaway wrote:
On 10/7/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
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.
I think you've put your finger on the problem there. The mechanisms by which Wikipedia articles improve and degrade are not fully understood, and there may well be some complex factors that we don't consider seriously enough.
But we can make a stab at guessing the main factor: entropy. An article that is edited frequently by many people will probably degrade quickly
I don't disagree with you, but it occurs to me that this is at least roughly a testable hypothesis.
One idea I suggested a while back, half jokingly, is that it should be possible to make a group decision to revert to an earlier version of an article. Articles do degrade and it may sometimes be a good idea to recognise that the overall effect of recent edits has been to destroy what was good about the article.
Of course, right now, there's no real need for a group decision to do this. It's perfectly acceptable (if a bit bold) to dig back six months into the past and resurrect an older version of an article before it went downhill. "Something went badly off track back there, so I resurrected the old article and seek help in incorporating any positive changes from intervening versions in a way that doesn't make the article read like chopped liver" sounds like a great thing to write on the talk page.
Today I summarily removed the Featured Article status from an article, [[Iraqi insurgency]], because it's now such an unholy mess, with two competing versions each pushing a point of view, and full of unreferenced statements and opinions represented as fact. And yet that article survived a move to remove its featured status as recently as June, 2005. Assuming that the earlier version really was better than the mess that exists today, perhaps it would be as well to revert to that version and to find ways to incorporate later work on this current event without degrading it.
I agree completely.
--Jimbo