I really don't know where you get these ideas from. How are low-quality articles "tolerated"? Who would rather have more articles than better articles? Who even thinks there is a choice between more articles and
better
articles?
Editor makes a good-faith edit to article. It is reverted by another editor who is uncompromisingly pushing a POV. A conflict results, sometimes more acrimonious than at other times.
Rinse, lather, repeat. Eventually the first editor will decide that it is more rewarding to start creating articles & turn those red links blue than to argue over content -- unless that editor is also uncompromising about a certain POV, & decides to squat on certain articles to preserve that POV.
Either path means that articles improve to a certain point, then unless something happens they remain at that level of quality. We need more tools to ensure that "something happens".
Geoff
I'm not sure you're referring to the same issue as Daniel, but you do raise a major one. What tools do you think we need more of to ensure that something happens?
I think the Requests for Comments page is a good idea for how to resolve these types of problems, but last time I followed it (many months ago) it was more about trying to get someone banned than about resolving problems with articles. Looking at the page again it seems it's been reorganized and more focused around "Article content disputes". But it's just a bunch of links to talk pages, so in that sense it's probably not focussed enough to do much good.
Do you think the RfC page could be adapted to resolve these issues more easily? I don't know if it could or not. It takes a lot of effort to argue your point effectively, and it's pretty easy for a troll to game the system until you give up. This is a really tough problem, somewhat inherent in the concept of a wiki, and I don't have much of a clue how to resolve it.
Initially I saw Wikipedia as more of a rough draft than a finished product. Over the years it's been made abundantly clear that the majority of Wikipedians don't see it that way. I've come to accept that, but I guess I never really figured out how it would work. Along those same lines, I've never heard anyone explain how you could solve the quality problems inherent in a wiki without throwing out all the advantages.
Nowadays my greatest optimism is that we'll be able to point to the highest quality version of any particular article, even if it isn't the most recent version. So in your example, the POV pusher might be able to make his/her version the latest version, but the software would still recognize that most people consider that version to be POV. I suppose if you're going to that you might as well just make that version the latest version, though. So now I've come full circle.
I don't know. :)
Anthony