[WikiEN-l] Times article (London)

[John Lee]

On 8/17/07, Andrey <yaroslavl at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> "An early version of an entry in Wikipedia will be written by someone who
> knows the subject, and later editors will dissipate whatever value is
> there."
>
> This happens very often, particularly with good and featured articles.
> Many
> outstanding pages have been eroded by anonymous know-it-alls
> into utter uselessness once their main contributors left the project.
> Unless
> we have content arbitration boards made up of professionals in any given
> field, we are likely to see an increase in complaints and a decrease in a
> number of knowledgable contributors.


Definitely - I've written my fair share of articles (featured and
non-featured - I gave up on good articles, though, once I realised that it
had lost track of its original purpose), and now that I am no longer active
besides making small edits or reverting vandalism every now and then, I can
see that a lot of things I have written have fallen in quality - even when I
was active, I had this experience (someone completely erased everything I
originally wrote for [[Education in Malaysia]] and started it from scratch -
since the new revision had worthwhile content, I was in no mood to revert,
nor could I have bothered with attempting to merge old missing information
in).

But with all that, it is important to bear in mind that on the balance, the
wiki model works - nobody can say it is borked when *most* articles are
improved by more editors looking at them. What's important to recognise is
that the wiki model is nevertheless imperfect, and we need some mechanism to
reduce the proportion of articles which are worsened by new editors over
time.

Johnleemk