[WikiEN-l] What to do about our writing quality?

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 09:01 PM 5/24/2008, Ian Woollard wrote:
>2008/5/25 Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <abd at lomaxdesign.com>:
> > I've seen
> > articles where text is added, sources are added, then someone takes
> > it out because, perhaps, they say it is unbalanced,
>
>I essentially always revert those kinds of edits.
>
>As a rule, adding material is the way to create balance; I'm not sure
>I've ever seen an example where removal of sourced material for
>balance is correct, but it could theoretically happen. There probably
>should be a bot that reverts all edits that remove material with
>references, with the subject line 'pov' (I'm not kidding).

Yes, generally. There is a question of balance that sometimes arises. 
Undue weight, is the argument that is used. Article on Topic A. 
Criticism of A is put in, sourced. There is other criticism of A. The 
argument can be made, and might be correct, that too much criticism 
is unbalanced. The question turns into what can be rather knotty, the 
question of relative notability.

My own conclusion is that the proper use of forking is, at least 
sometimes, a good solution, where there starts to be imbalance, or at 
least reasonably allegable imbalance. Thus, in the end, the solution 
is indeed, don't remove sourced material, but add it, and the 
question again becomes the basic encyclopedic task, which is not 
inclusion/exclusion, but categorization. What *article* does this detail go in?

(And what *level* of article; we will soon have two levels, at least, 
standard articles and verified articles. We could have more. My 
opinion is that nothing verifiable of human knowledge should be 
excluded. If it is verifiable and someone noticed it and cared enough 
to create an article, it's sufficiently "notable," because, 
obviously, it was "noticed." But not necessarily important enough to 
intrude on readers who are not specifically digging for it.)