[WikiEN-l] So what do we do about this?

[Michael Turley]

On 10/17/05, Snowspinner <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> [[2004 U.S. presidential election controversy and irregularities]]
> and its 8 sub-articles, at present, take up 56085 words. This is five
> times as much as the whole of our coverage on Immanuel Kant.
>
> The articles are, needless to say, utter crap - full of conspiracy
> theory rantings and POV, they read like the collected waste products
> of a month of blogging, which is, not coincidentally, exactly what
> they are.
>
> All of them have been VfDed on two occasions a year or so ago when
> the election actually happened, and survived. In that time, they've
> only gotten worse, more bloated, and more absurd.
>
> What can we do about these articles, and other cases of what we might
> call POV by volume - [[Jack Thompson (attorney)]] and [[Westboro
> Baptist Church]] spring to mind here as well.
>
> My inclination, quite honestly, is to speedy all nine of these
> election articles and let people start over. Whatever comes now, a
> year after the event, cannot possibly be as appallingly bad as this.
>
> And don't just shoot back with {{sofixit}} - there's no good fix. It
> would involve deleting 90% of all 8 of these articles, a change that
> would be quickly reverted anyway, and, with the way my editing has
> been going, probably lead to my getting another RfC, because they
> seem all the rage.
>
> We need some sort of system that's going to untangle this kind of
> mess - something that doesn't rely on enough people with a whit of
> common sense watchlisting the articles and being willing to angrily
> revert the stupid, because, quite frankly, that obviously didn't work
> here.
>
> Thoughts? Jimbo in particular?

Leave them.  Edit them now and then.  Cite references for all your
changes.  Use cleanup tags liberally.  Use NPOV tags as necessary.

As they mature, they'll become better articles.  It's hard to see the
long view of history from this close.  Don't abandon them for later,
but keep in mind how recent and contentious these events are.  Their
historical impact is still being defined.  Immanuel Kant, on the other
hand, has been dead for 201 years, so it's clearly easier to see his
ultimate historical impact.

--
Michael Turley
User:Unfocused