[WikiEN-l] Inclusion of unmaintainable articles

[Bryan Derksen]

Andrew Gray wrote:
> Here's a question which has been (to my mind, at least) raised by the
> recent Fleshlight debate...
> 
> ...should Wikipedia keep articles which the community is unwilling to maintain?

I just read an interesting thread on Usenet where someone "tested"
Wikipedia by going back to articles in his area of expertise that he'd
worked on six months ago and checking to see whether they'd improved,
remained the same, or degraded in quality since then. (message ID
1160450561.103548.50770 at c28g2000cwb.googlegroups.com if anyone's
interested). It was an impromptu "study", but he made a pretty good case
suggesting that the article on [[Leon Trotsky]] had degraded
significantly since he'd worked on it; in particular it was apparently
targeted by [[User:Wumbo]], a subtle vandal who carefully inserted false
information that still hadn't been cleaned out despite being exposed as
a vandal months ago based on his work on other articles.

Is [[Leon Trotsky]] less maintainable than [[Fleshlight]], and should we
therefore get rid of it?

I'm wondering if the long-promised version-marking system will help,
once it's finally activated. It could go a long way toward helping us
identify which articles might be in need of maintenance and which have
had at least some degree of checking done on them.

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