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@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.