[WikiEN-l] An example of a bad biography

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 12:05 PM, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> Jimmy Wales wrote:
>  > The article has never, even once, contained any useful information about
>  > the victim.  It has always been a stub.  A quick look around the web
>  > suggests that it will never be more than a stub.
>  >
>
>  I'm not sure what you intend to prove with this straw-man. You found one
>  article that has been on Wikipedia for nine days, that should have been
>  deleted, but hasn't been. Nobody's even objected to its deletion!

The article spent the vast majority of its short first life as
something which any experienced editor would have blanked or speedy
deleted on sight had they actually been read.

So I'll take this moment to remind people of the new page patrol
feature that Enwiki has had for a number of months now:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:NewPages  If you're logged in
"unpatroled" pages will be yellow. You can click "Hide patrolled
edits" to hide pages that other people have patrolled.

If you click on the page you'll have an opportunity to mark the page
as patrolled through a link in the lower right corner or the article.
Anyone autoconfirmed or better can patrol as the site is currently
configured.

A persistent log of every patrolling action is kept, and you can
determine who patrolled a particular page by looking at the page logs
from the page history.

This mechanism allows Wikipedia to gain positive evidence that a
wikipedia user has seen every new page, and it accomplishes this
efficiently.  ... but only if people use it!


>  Considering we have over 2 million articles, this is unsurprising.

Sheer quantity might make failure harder to avoid, even unsurprising,
but it never excuses it.