[WikiEN-l] Featured article deterioration

[Fastfission]

I've wondered what the best way is to deal with this sort of thing.
One might be to make FA status awarded to specific versions of the
article in a more direct way -- i.e. the FA template on the talk page
could link directly to the version which was voted to be featured, to
make comparisons with the current article easier.

Another is a better way of detecting bad edits. I've seen a lot of
really bad content sneak into high-visibility and highly-watched
articles because of the following pattern:

1. Editor X vandalizes an article once
2. Editor Y vandalizes the article three times
3. Admin Z reverts Editor Y, does not look at the edit of Editor X

This is especially prevalent when there is a small spate of vandalism.
I try to make sure I always check the current version against
something further down the page,  but it's hard to remember to do in
all cases. Perhaps if it was easier (i.e., with a single click and
without any looking at the history) to see the diff for the edits done
by the most recent five users (sorting it by user rather than edit
would make it easier to avoid skipping single bad edits)? Maybe if
there was a regularized system of evaluating many edits at a time and
screening them for problematic content? Maybe we need to find ways to
get around seeing histories as collections of single edits and rather
as clusters of edits? I don't exactly know. I'm just speculating
wildly here and not proposing anything concrete.

I don't think anyone thinks the wiki system is flawless in any
respect, or that infinite edits means an infinitely good article.
There are benefits and detriments, and a good working-philosophy is to
try and focus on ways in which can -- utilizing social, technological,
and other approaches -- try and boost the strengths of the positive
aspects and get around the negative ones. It's no more destined to
succeed than it is doomed to fail.

FF


On 4/11/06, Ben Greenberg <bengreenb at hotmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>
>
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