John Lee wrote:
On 8/17/07, Andrey yaroslavl@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I gave up on good articles, though, once I realised that it had lost track of its original purpose), and now that I am no longer active besides making small edits or reverting vandalism every now and then, I can see that a lot of things I have written have fallen in quality - even when I was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.
Using the example of your [[Education in Malaysia]] it's the kind of thing where you, as the original writer start with a vision of the article as a whole, but the deterioration comes from successive small edits which limit their focus on single phrases and sentences. Very few of us outside of Malaysia are likely to have any interest in the subject whatsoever, though I could see that the racial and religious divides in that country could be the basis for controversy. To a large extent the obsession that has developed over sourcing information has focussed attention on the minutiae of articles, and, instead of free flowing and readable articles, the result is articles full of axe marks or old socks which have been too often darned.
I don't think that content arbitration boards are the solution. If that were a winning technique Nupedia would have been more successful.
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