[WikiEN-l] Featured article deterioration

[Ben Greenberg]

Its simply naive to say that infinite edits means an infinitely good 
article.  If you dont believe that bad, non-vandalism edits take their toll 
on articles, I invite you to look at the Featured article review.  So many 
articles are ruined by people who simply aren't good at writing prose, and 
who enjoy adding useless factoids.  Articles quite often get worse-- if your 
idealism has you believing otherwise, please look at this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hip_hop_music&diff=41510779&oldid=36727078

This should be a big wakeup call to anyone who thinks that the pure wiki 
system allows articles to get better indefinitely.  Unless we do something 
about it, wikipedia will simply be a place where articles get great then 
start to deteriorate.  I'm not suggesting stable versions, but surely... 
something needs to be done.