[WikiEN-l] Article quality deterioration (was: a valid criticism)

[slimvirgin at gmail.com]

On 10/10/05, uninvited at nerstrand.net <uninvited at nerstrand.net> wrote:
> The problem is that people come along and make incremental changes each
> of which, taken alone, is unremarkable -- neither helpful nor
> especially detrimental to the article.  In aggregate, such changes
> destroy the organization of the article and compromise any stylistic
> unity that may be present.
>
> Such changes should really be reverted when they are made, with a kind
> note offered to the other editor.
>
> But Responsible Wikipedians Don't Revert Changes.
>
> We have a culture of egalitarianism and a culture where reverting
> changes is strongly discouraged.

Right, this is a real problem. We've got an RfC going at the moment
about an editor accused of reverting too much, when what he was doing
was trying to preserve halfway-decent writing, and one of the people
who has commented here in praise of good writing has criticized this
editor in the RfC for reverting too much, which strikes me as somewhat
contradictory.

What are we supposed to do when editors cause the writing in an
article to deteriorate, if  not revert? Are a bunch of people who care
about good writing supposed to be on hand constantly to carefully tidy
up after others, just so that we can avoid wholesale reverting? It
simply isn't realistic to expect that. The fact is that lots of
editors add material that is badly written, badly sourced, unsourced,
and wrong -- and reverting, including repeatedly reverting, is
sometimes the only practical way to keep the page reasonably
encyclopedic looking.

Sarah