The Cunctator wrote:
On 1/4/07, Robth <robth1(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 1/3/07, Ray Saintonge
<saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote:
Robth wrote:
Remember, people learn to write Wikipedia by
reading
Wikipedia. If we're going to relax our content standards
substantially for one area, people are going to carry the lessons they
learn from reading that area into the rest of Wikipedia.
Do you have any evidence for that theory? Those who are interested only
in "serious" subjects are not likely to spend a lot of time with the
flakier subjects in order to learn how to write for Wikipedia. We also
have Study Groups (aka WikiProjects) which do a pretty good job setting
standards for their area of interest.
It's a hard theory to provide specific evidence for, seeing as it does
involve trying to get inside people's heads, which is all but
impossible on the internet. What I do think we can reasonably state,
though, is as follows:
1. People learn more about how to write Wikipedia from reading
articles than they do from reading style guides. I know this has been
the case with me, and I haven't met anyone with whom it isn't. We
have an ungodly amount of guideline material relating to what articles
should look like, and anyone who attempted to read it all before
sitting down to begin writing for Wikipedia would get bored and give
up before they ever started typing. Style guidelines are all well and
good, but we have to acknowledge that, at the end of the day, the
drive-by contributors who account for most of our material are, in the
best case scenario, going to write something that looks like other
articles they have read on Wikipedia. The better the average article
is, the better the average passer-by contribution is likely to be.
Think how great it would be if just 1 out of every 10 college kids who
make a drive-by contribution to Wikipedia went and got a book from the
library, checked their facts, and cited their sources when they wrote.
That isn't impossible, but it would require that our across-the-board
quality be high enough that getting the book would seem like the
natural way to contribute to Wikipedia. Quality begets quality.
I fully agree with above.
Sure. We also know how thoroughly people read software manuals. We do
have all sorts of articles that are bloody awful, but we have to give
our serious contributors a little credit for recognizing trash. Each
new contributor will follow his own writing style. He may look at the
bad articles to understand how wiki markup is used, but that doesn't
mean that he will adopt someone else's writing style. If he makes
atrocious gaffes in his writing I would hope that someone who notices
this will become a mentor who understandingly encourages him to improve,
rather than criticises him on his stupid style.
2. You can't quarantine topics from each other.
Now I'm not arguing
that people are going to read poorly sourced
webcomic articles and
then immediately go write articles on medieval Scandinavian literature
sourced from the same blogs. You refer to people who are "only
interested in serious topics", but people do read and write about more
than one topic apiece on Wikipedia. And there is a startling amount
of really shitty content about serious academic topics on the web,
waiting for people who have learned to look to google for their
sources to come snap it up. I don't use web sources when I'm writing,
but every now and then I google the topic I'm working on and am blown
away by the sheer quantity of incorrect information there is out
there. If people observe that "Some Internet Guy said it" is accepted
as a reasonable source for large portions of our site, they're going
to go look and see what Some Internet Guy has to say about medieval
Scandinavian literature when they decide to help out Wikipedia by
writing an article about this cool book they just heard about.
This I find hard to believe.
Yes, at some point you need to accept that you do not have a monopoly on
good sense. Sometimes other editors, including newbies, hav a little of
it. Fixing an article should always remain a preferred option. Quick
deletions as a solution is a bit like forbidding one's children to go
out because you're afraid they might meet bad people.
3. We don't
have the manpower to contain the spillover. This is my
problem with the argument that we can allow Some Internet Guy to serve
as our source for articles about stuff that only Some Internet Guy
cares enough about to write about, but then, through rigourous
enforcement of our standards in other topics, ensure that only
reliable sources are accepted for most subjects. Now this might work
for subjects like Israel-Palestine, where both the IDF and Hamas have
full-time personnel vetting every single edit (or have we not reached
that point quite yet?), but it won't work for the vast majority of
topics, in which most articles are monitored loosely or not at all,
and any edit that isn't vandalism tends to stick. Remember, source
quality and style guidelines are invoked only in those rare cases
where two people find themselves working on the same article at the
same time; editing in a fairly popular academic subject area, I have
seen such simultaneous editing on only two or three occasions (outside
of the FA or GA processes) in my year here. We don't have the
resources to maintain the kind of line that seems to be envisioned in
many people's comments on this topic.
I really find the "spillover" argument profoundly unconvincing.
Failing to have the resources is not an argument for extreme action.
What happens in trying to bring an article to feature status is only
going to happen in a handful of articles. One should not expect such
rigour in the vast majority of articles.
Both sides of the Israel/Palestine issue have enough English-speaking
readers to maintain a dynamic tension about the subject. Nevertheless,
I would suspect that the tone of the articles is very different on HE:WP
or AR:WP.
We all have our own image of what is needed for an ideal article. For
any article this develops over time, sometimes over a very long time.
An early stage article may be deficient in many respects. Only
blatantly illegal, offensive or vandalous activities require immediate
attention. Otherwise, fix what you can or leave deficiency notices and
move on. Eventually someone who is interested in the subject will do
what needs to be done.
Ec