[WikiEN-l] Deterioration of Featured Articles

[Ryan Delaney]

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.


I'm really getting confused now. You just described the whole process of how
articles get improved on Wikipedia, and then say that they don't only get
improved. I mean, yeah; sometimes people add stuff to Wikipedia that doesn't
follow the style guide / is badly written, typos etc / isn't wholly neutral
/ isn't referenced / etc. And then someone else comes along and makes it
better. That's the whole purpose of the collaborative process. Isn't that
what it means for an article to "always get better"? Isn't that what we are
doing? Maybe I am missing the point here, but...

To put it in the strictest theoretical terms, an Wikipedia with zero edits
is worthless. Wikipedia with infinite edits is perfect. I really believe
that, mind you -- I believe that after infinite edits, Wikipedia will be
perfect. Of course, we'll never get there, but each edit puts us closer. So
all this talk about "deterioration" is puzzling to me.

Ryan