[WikiEN-l] Deterioration of Featured Articles

[Steve Bennett]

On 4/10/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> More often than not, people will add stuff to an article, and some time
> later, another editor will come along and clean it up. Then some more
> stuff will be added, and some time later, it will get cleaned up again.
> Very rarely do you see an article /only/ get better (one example I *can*
> think of is [[Jordanhill railway station]]
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordanhill_railway_station>), but that was
> an extraordinary case.

Someone should do some analysis of Wikipedia article development
cycles/processes. For some articles, I think in terms of an accordeon
model. People add content, which is full of air, redundancy etc. Then
more people add content in the same style. Then someone comes along
and squeezes the whole lot down to its basic essence. A 500 word
paragraph becomes a 200 word paragraph, almost without losing
information.

Other times, I see a huge slab of prose which has become so big that
people feel uncomfortable adding to it. They see that the "History of
X" section of the article is so long, they shouldn't touch it any
more. I simply insert subheadings by year, and suddenly they realise
that the period 1950-1960 is totally blank. I don't have a name for
that model.

Then other times, someone creates a stub, then someone else sees how
to structure the article, and creates a whole structure full of
subheadings, but with no actual text. But it actually constrains
future editors, who wouldn't necessarily have used that particular
structure. I came across a good example of this recently but can't
find it now :/

There are probably lots of other models...a bit of analysis and we
could find solutions to some of the problems, identify the models that
work best etc.

Steve