[WikiEN-l] Semi-solid evidence that process is in fact dangerous to Wikipedia

[Sage Ross]

On 9/4/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 04/09/06, Sage Ross <ragesoss+wikipedia at gmail.com> wrote:
> > My intuition is that Featured Articles and Good Articles have a
> > significantly larger portion of established editors as the main
> > contributors, even by the word count metric.
>
>
> That's because it's bloody impossible to get through them without
> being fabulous at the politics, even for experienced editors. FAC in
> particular is a great example of gratuitous requests for shrubberies
> BY POLICY!!!


True enough, to some extent.  Maybe instead of using process-dependent
criteria, choose well-cited articles and/or long articles... or articles
also present in Britannica (i.e., mainstream significant topics).  The real
issue is, adding new content is only the first stage in an article's life.
At some point, most of the significant information is there, but to improve
beyond a somewhat disorganized collection of unverified information
(probably true, but unverified nonetheless) and become a decent article, it
often takes rewriting, reorganizing, fact-checking/citation, etc.  Using
AaronSW's metric, mature articles will likely be more the product of
established editors than the example in the blog article.  And at a minimum,
I don't think we can consider an article mature without a high level of
citations.  The point is valid that much of what anons do is NOT typos and
vandalism, but it doesn't (necessarily) mean the head of the Wikipedia
editors distribution doesn't still create the majority of Wikipedia's
content value.

It's not very easy to write a coherent article on a complex topic several
paragraphs at a tiime (with a different person adding each chunk).  The
people who become involved enough to do research, track down citations, and
re-write and re-organize articles have to spend a fair amount of time on
Wikipedia (and, naturally, rack up a fair number of edits).
-Ragesoss